FILM: Knives Out

Our Thanksgiving weekend movie was Knives Out. What a fun suspenseful whodunnit, contemporary but with the classic feel of an Agatha Christie mystery. It has all the elements: a big mansion with hidden elements and creaky stairs, the apparent suicide (or was it?) of an elderly multi-millionaire author (who made his fortune on – what else – murder mysteries), and a houseful of dysfunctional family members each with their own motive for wanting grandpa dead. Something is clearly afoot at Thrombey Manor, and only ace mystery solver Benoit Blanc (charmingly played by Daniel Craig sporting a genteel southern accent) can get to the bottom of it. Writer/director Rian Johnson skillfully spins out the mystery Rashomon style, as each family member is interrogated in turn, and we see each recollection of the events of the fateful night, colored by their biases and motives, then airbrushed and embellished as they tell it to the detectives. Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Chris Evans, Toni Collette, and several others provide the colorful characters on this Clue board. The deceased patriarch was portrayed by Christopher Plummer as such a chess-master that his stories must have been at least this good (and how much of this one last story did he himself orchestrate?). And then there’s Marta, the nurse-companion, an immigrant from some ambiguous Latin country with the inconvenient inability to lie without throwing up. Everyone seems to love her and consider her part of the family. At least until the knives come out. This mystery has donut holes inside donut holes, and you probably won’t figure it out before Benoit Blanc does, but looking back, you’ll see that all of the clues were there. Such good fun!

Also have to give a shout out / plug to Exceptional Minds Studio, a local non-profit professional training academy and studio for visual effects artists and animators with autism. Exceptional Minds did the closing titles for this film. They provide individuals on the autism spectrum with the technical and behavioral skills required for employment in the entertainment fields of animation and post production visual effects, with the goal of breaking the vicious stereotypes resulting in low expectations that burden those in our society with special needs. I have two cousins who have graduated from this exceptional academy, and we are regular supporters. (Thanks, no doubt, to Jamie Lee Curtis for the opportunity to work on this film. She is a notable supporter of Exceptional Minds.)

Remembering Unc

From my earliest memories and throughout my life, my Unc Hal was a presence in my life that embodied what family meant. If you asked me at any point in my life who my “close family” was, after my Mom, Dad, and brother, there was no question that it was Tante Elayne and Unc Harold, and their kids, my cousins Donna and Victor. My mother and her sister were not to be separated, so when my Mom got married and settled in Los Angeles, Tante and Unc uprooted their young family and moved from New York to be close to us. Thus, when I was growing up, they were just always part of our family life. Most days, we were over at their house or they were over at ours. I know I had other aunts and uncles and cousins in Indiana and New York and Washington, and we loved them too, but more abstractly. Tante and Unc and Donna and Victor were my familiar family, the ones I just took as a given that we saw all the time, so that when you say “uncle”, I can’t help but picture Unc Hal.

When they first moved to California, Unc drove a delivery truck for Frito Lay, and as a very little kid, I have memories of Unc’s truck parked in the driveway, and sometimes being allowed to go into the truck and pick out a bag of Fritos. (In those days, the delivery trucks were not huge, more like the size of neighborhood ice cream trucks.) Among the Dads in our family and the neighborhood, I think he was the most likely to get down in the grass and wrestle and tumble with us on the front lawn. He had a growly voice, but teddy bear growly, not scary growly. He was mostly soft spoken, although he was certainly capable of raising the volume when the discussion around the family dinner table got loud, and he and Tante had no trouble shouting to each other across supermarket aisles (“ELAYNE! DO WE NEED MORE COOKIES?”). (Unc did love his cookies, and there was always a well-stocked cookie jar at their house.) At some point in my childhood, Unc quit the FritoLay truck and started his own business washing windows for shops and restaurants, a job he would work until he retired. As a kid, I only understood that he had to get up crazy early in the morning because he had to drive to far-flung locations all over the city, and that his clients preferred their windows get washed before their open business hours. I also came to understand that some of the places he went were parts of town that the rest of us might be apprehensive to go to, but Unc was unassuming and approachable, the sort of guy who could talk to pretty much anybody. And he’d sometimes come back with funny stories. I remember one time, he asked us “Did you know that ‘bad’ can mean ‘good’?” Turns out he was washing windows at a furniture store, and while he was there, a couple of black women were there on the sidewalk looking in the windows and saying “Look at all that baaad furniture!” After they’d said this a couple of times, he got curious and asked them, “did your family have a bad experience buying furniture here?”, and they laughed and gave him a lesson in Inglewood street slang. His openness to talk to anyone extended even beyond borders and language barriers. When Tante and Unc traveled to Paris with my parents, at one point when they needed directions, Unc was the one who, despite any useful French, was willing to go up to someone and ask directions. He went to ask a nearby vendor whether they spoke English, but his attempt at “Anglais?” must have come out more like “une glace”. When he returned and the others asked what he had found out, he laughed and said “I still don’t know where we are, but I got this ice cream cone.”

Our family liked our routines and little traditions: Saturday night was always “restaurant night”, and we would always meet up with my aunt, uncle, and cousins at a neighborhood restaurant for a dinner out. Usually nothing fancy, except for birthday celebrations which were diligently observed. Sunday nights were “hamburger night” when I was young, and later evolved to “family dinner night” after the kids had all grown up and left home. Sunday nights alternated between my parents and Tante & Unc’s house, with whichever “children” were not out of town expected to show up. Conversations ranged from politics to family news/gossip to just the minutiae of our lives, as you do when you see someone so regularly. Unc and my Dad also shared an interest in business and investments, and would talk about that until Mom would scream “Are you two still talking about IRAs??”. (You can’t dispute that Unc must have saved and invested prudently, as he leveraged his modest window-washing business toward paying off a house in the suburbs, raising a family comfortably, and having enough retirement savings that his children never had to worry about paying for his care.) I’ve been grateful to have these family routines as steady markers throughout my life, something I could always count on even when other things changed. Except for the few years I lived on the east coast, and until he moved to Virginia just a year and a half ago, Unc has celebrated every one of my birthdays with me, and we’ve had a meal together probably three out of every four weekends my entire life. It’s only now looking back across all those years, realizing that our last birthday or family dinner together is passed, that I fully appreciate how remarkable that is.

When Tante passed three years ago, we kept up our Sunday nights, either bringing in take-out food to Unc’s or driving him over to my folks’ house. But after a while, he was becoming less capable and more depressed, so we convinced him to move to Virginia where he could be near his daughter Donna and her three grown children. Though we missed him in California, it was a great move because he got to see Donna and his grandchildren all the time, and he got to celebrate their family events together. He lived to see his granddaughter Brenna have a baby boy, and just days before he passed, he got to meet his newborn great-granddaughter. He saw his granddaughter Rachel regularly through her pregnancy, and was eager to meet the baby, excited to be a twice great-grandfather. It seemed he was hanging on just for that, before going to his rest after a good long life (just a couple months short of 90). Thanks, Unc Hal, for showing me what an uncle is, and for the gift of your faithful presence throughout my life.

STAGE: The New One

This evening we saw The New One at the Ahmanson Theatre. I hardly stopped laughing this entire show, so I need a moment to catch my breath. If you’re a fan of This American Life, you’ve probably heard Mike Birbiglia before. With his voice and his delivery, he could read a phone book and make it funny, so when he’s really got something to say, it’s hysterical. In this show, he relates his experience of reluctantly becoming a father. Those things that all new fathers probably think at one time or another but would never dare say out loud, he says out loud. And it’s so funny because it’s so true and ultimately so humane. Birbiglia is a stand-up comic by nature, and he turns the Ahmanson into a comedy club, deftly drawing in a few low-hanging audience members into his act. The stage and show are largely devoid of props and set, just a stool, except for one point where props come in to great effect. If you have kids, or if you know people who have kids, or if you’re dead set against ever being around kids, you’ll enjoy this show tremendously.

FOOD: Guerrilla Tacos

In the dynamic culinary explosion that is LA, some of the best food is served not on white table cloths but in places where you order at the register, take a number, and seat yourself. That’s how it is at Guerrilla Tacos in the DTLA Arts District. Chef Wes Avila’s food truck had been rated one of LA’s top restaurants, but he’s now parked the truck and set up a brick-and-mortar where you can enjoy his dazzlingly creative tacos along with micheladas or cocktails if you like. The pork terrine taco takes inspiration from Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches: pork paired with julienned carrots and jicama, cilantro and mint, fresno pepper, enriched with a schmear of chicken liver mousse. Just take away the French sandwich roll and serve it on top of a blue corn tortilla (fresh from nearby Kernel of Truth Organics tortilleria in Boyle Heights). Served with the tortilla folded over the meat, with the schmear on the outside and the veggies and herbs piled on top, that’s when I realized why I was given a fork and knife. My other two tacos came open-faced, also on those blue corn tortillas. The saag curry eggplant taco features fried eggplant chunks bathed in two sauces, a rich curry and a piquant mint chutney. The fire is strong, but balanced with sweet raisins and marcona almond bits. The famous sweet potato taco (others vary seasonally but this one has been a persistent signature) covers slices of roast sweet potato with an almond chile sauce, dollops of soft fresh feta, fresh scallions, and crumbles of fried corn. It’s all a creative feast of hot, sweet, fresh, rich, soft, crunch that makes this taco stand worthy of Michelin notice (now that those Michelin folks have crawled out from under their white table cloth and learned how to appreciate LA).

FILM: Harriet

I knew little about Harriet Tubman beyond the barest synopsis of her as a leading figure in the Underground Railroad, and was thrilled to expand my understanding of this inspirational woman’s story as told in the new biopic Harriet. (As is inevitable for any biopic, some characters and details have been invented for dramatic necessity, but the film is fairly historically grounded in the broader story.) I was on the edge of my seat through most of this film as this diminutive but determined woman not only made her own solo run to freedom (when nobody thought she could do it on her own), but then made repeated daring returns back into slave territory to help others escape. It’s one thing to read in school about the Underground Railroad, the network of just-minded people who offered temporary hiding places and onward guidance. It’s quite another to have it brought to life on the screen, with all the powers of film-making harnessed to make you experience the feeling of running through the woods at night with hounds in hot pursuit. A textbook just doesn’t quicken the pulse like a film can. But much more than just a sequence of harrowing escapes is the monument of this woman’s faith and determination. I learned that, like Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman experienced visions. Explained at least in part as seizure-like episodes resulting from a head trauma when she was young, she understood them as God showing her things, sometimes premonitions of immediate danger, sometimes prophesies of things to come later. In any case, they affirmed her faith that God was leading her, and gave her a fierce courage to do what she needed to do. This, together with her resolve to live free or die, leads her to the central purpose in her life, that she should return and help others rather than cling to safety in the North. When other leaders of the Underground try to dissuade her, telling her that an illiterate black woman would not be able to succeed, she thunders back like an Old Testament prophet, “Nobody thought I could escape on my own, but the Lord was with me. And here I am. So don’t you tell me what I can’t do.” The performance of this character by Cynthia Erivo is transcendent, inspiring awe that makes the film. She is steely fierce, but also has some very human moments. While Harriet Tubman is not an unsung hero, this film, surprisingly the first feature film to be made of her, shows me that she hasn’t been sung enough. Can’t wait for her to be on the $20 bill.

FILM: Parasite

The Korean film Parasite won the Palm d’Or at Cannes this year, and has been raved about by critics. It was definitely not what we expected, though I’m not sure what I did expect. It’s hard to even categorize. While it has a few moments of suspense and even horror, it’s not a horror suspense film. In fact most of it deals fairly lightly and deftly with some heavy social commentary about the widening chasm between rich and poor, and its thoroughly unexpected ending is a strangely beautiful alloy of hope (wistful? misplaced? persistent?) and irony. The most comparable films I can think of are last year’s Shoplifters (a beautiful Japanese film also about a sympathetic family near the bottom rung of society doing what they can to scrape by) and Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. One could say that Parasite is like Roma, but with more plot and less brooding. (HG Wells’ The Time Machine also comes to mind, not for the science fiction but for the social critique.) In the opening scene, we meet the Kim family in their basement apartment with a transom window looking onto a gritty street, and the young adult son and daughter trying to maneuver their phones to just the right corner of the ceiling where they can get a bit of free wifi. Soon after, we meet the Park family, living in luxury behind a gate, in a house designed by a renowned architect with a light and spacious yard. When the Kims insinuate themselves into the lives of the Park family in various positions of service, it sets off a chain of very unexpected events that serve to illuminate the contrast in their social positions. These contrasts are beautifully underscored with cinematic artistry: the spaciousness and lightness of the Parks’ house emphasized with long / wide angles and tracking shots, while tight strained angles show the cramped and dingy nature of the Kims’ basement. Director Bong Joon-Ho created a very visual verticality to the social dynamic, most fulsomely brought out when some of the Kims make a dash in the rain from the Park house to their own home, and it’s all down, down, down. As their near their home, we get a high downward shot on their street, half obscured by a rat’s nest of exposed utility wires (probably half bootlegged), and the muddy rainwater gushing down the street toward their apartment, below grade at the bottom of the slope. The claustrophobia of their apartment is ratcheted way up when it is literally filling up with sewage overflow, and they struggle to grab a few key possessions before bailing out to a shelter. Meanwhile this same rainstorm that is catastrophic to the poorer part of town below is for the Parks just an inconvenience that has spoiled plans for a birthday camping trip. The Parks live their lives on a cloud of effortlessness. As mother Kim observes, their lives are full of creases and wrinkles, but when you have money like the Parks do, money is like an iron that smooths out all the creases. Mr. Park walks through his house and up his stairs, and the lights turn on as he approaches and off as he goes past. He doesn’t understand how this happens, and he doesn’t even really think about it. The Parks give no thought to a lot of things that have to happen to make their lives just work so smoothly. The structures that the great architect has designed into the foundation of their house are long forgotten and taken for granted. But like an iceberg, it’s the submerged part that you can’t see that proves the most dangerous. I came away from this film haunted by the allegory and the poetic imagery of social divides; George just said he’s going to have nightmares. While this isn’t exactly Roma, I think Roma is a good yardstick. If you’re the sort who loved Roma, then I think you’d appreciate this.

Evergreen Cemetery in East LA

The cemetery that I visited for Dia de los Muertos was an especially interesting cemetery. Evergreen Cemetery was established in 1877 and is one of LA’s oldest. Many LA scions and pioneers have prominent stones here, names you would recognize from streets and towns like Van Nuys, Lankershim, Bixby, and Hollenbeck. Joseph W. Robinson (department store founder) is here, as is George Ralphs (grocery store founder). But this cemetery represents LA in all its facets. It is notable for never having banned African-Americans from being buried here, unlike many other cemeteries of its time. I visited the grave of Biddy Mason, a remarkable woman I’ve written about before who began life as a slave and ended it as a wealthy philanthropist who co-founded the First AME Church in LA. And I visited James Banning, an aviation pioneer who was the first black pilot to fly coast-to-coast. Many Japanese are interred here, including the Garden of the Pines, a section for the Issei (first-generation immigrants), and an impressive monument to the Japanese heroes of the 442nd Regiment in World War II. Many Armenians are here, and from the dates on their stones, I could see that many were from their first generation of immigrants fleeing the WWI-era genocide in their homeland. Many generations of Mexican-American families are here. The only marginalized group were the Chinese-Americans, who were forced to use a corner of the “potter’s field”, a large area on the east end of the cemetery where indigent people were buried in mostly unmarked graves. They were allowed to build a small shrine in their corner of the potter’s field, which from 1888 is the oldest surviving structure of Chinese settlement in LA. In 2005, when the Metro Gold Line extension was being put through along 1st Street, the excavations uncovered skeletal remains of 174 people who forensic analysis determined were all Chinese. The remains were interred near the shrine, and a memorial was erected, with 174 stones containing messages in Chinese, English, and Spanish of remembrance and blessing. This whole sprawling cemetery is such a great capsule of our city’s demographic history. (See full album of photos.)

Dia de los Muertos, East LA

I spent much of today in a cemetery in Boyle Heights (an East LA neighborhood with a traditionally Mexican-American population) seeing how people there were marking Dia de los Muertos. While it was a large cemetery, the bright orange marigolds specific to the Mexican tradition, used in abundance, made it easy to spot the graves that had been decorated for the occasion. The bright orange flowers, both whole and strewn petals, were arranged to illuminate a path for the souls to make their way back to earth for one night. It is presumed that the souls would be thirsty from their journey, so bottles of water, or perhaps the deceased’s favorite beverage (beer, tequila) would be left on the grave. Candy was common as well, and at one grave, I even saw fries and chicken strips awaiting one returning soul. I saw a number of people in the graveyard visiting loved ones and decorating their graves. The mood is somehow both reflective and festive. I saw whole families with children, some setting up umbrellas and making a picnic of it, some blaring Nortense music from their car. There was an elderly couple visiting some graves, the man in a wheelchair and his wife reading inscriptions to him. (I helped them back to their car when I saw she was having trouble maneuvering his wheelchair through the uneven grass.) As I always do in graveyards, I get lost in reading the inscriptions on the stones, finding little pieces of stories. In this cemetery, many had died way too young, and some had married and parented quite young too. Others lived good long lives and were mourned by generations. I like the attitude of this holiday. It reminds us all that we are a thread in a larger tapestry, a thread with a beginning and an end, but which finds a larger meaning woven together with the threads that came before us, and that have touched us, and that we will touch.

In my Dia de los Muertos tour, I also made a couple of other stops. Self Help Graphics & Art is a community art center in Boyle Heights, and in October, it’s an ofrenda factory. You can find it easily by the murals covering the building on East 1st St. While most of their handiwork is now on display in Grand Park, there were a few community-themed ofrendas still here. One was an altar to those who had died suffering the stigma of mental illness. Another was an altar to children who had died trying to cross the border, with a “sea” of messages of encouragement written by local school children on construction paper fish. Yet another was a tribute to passed heroes, where people left photos and notes to those who had inspired them, some famous figures and some very personal. My other stop was La Monarca Bakery, a Boyle Heights tradition, where I sampled pan de muertos, a mildly sweet bun with hints of orange zest, with crossed bones on top. They had piled boxes of these, which many people will bring to the graveyard tonight and tomorrow, or just to other Dia de los Muertos celebrations. And they also had an ofrenda, remembering those passed in the La Monarca family. (And of course this altar had pan de muerto on it!)

(See full album of pictures from my Dia de los Muertos tour.)

BOOKS: Giovanni's Room

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”

In a train of thought that started with Zak Ové’s sculpture installation at LACMA, I recently got to thinking about James Baldwin, and how I’d never read him, and I really should. He’d been coming up over the past year, as we visited where he lived in St Paul de Vence, and I later saw the film adapted from his book If Beale Street Could Talk. Like his Civil Rights Era contemporary Bayard Rustin, Baldwin bore two crosses, being black and gay. Being such an outsider can certainly heighten one’s sense of social observation and personal introspection. Matching such a vantage point with his facility with language was bound to result in some great literature, and thus I picked up his novel Giovanni’s Room, arguably 35 years later than I ought to have.

“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.”

Even though the world has changed immensely since Baldwin wrote this in 1956, and even since 1982 when I started coming out, so much in this landmark novel reaches incisively across all those decades. While it is very much embedded in a specific, vividly described time and place – 1950s Paris and its under-the-radar gay scene – its emotional insight still resonates today. The protagonist is an American ex-pat on the verge of being engaged to a woman, when he meets and falls in love with a man, and ultimately has to make a choice with devastating consequences. Yet that synopsis, while accurate, is about as true as saying that Les Misérables is a jail-break story. With Baldwin, that plot is just the frame in which he paints a dead-on psychological portrait of subconsciously intentional self-unawareness and avoidance. He describes with such beautiful language that if you’re the sort to turn down the corner of a page when a passage really grabs you, you’ll have folded more than half the pages by the end. (I’ve pulled out just a couple of my favorite quotes here.) Giovanni, who knows exactly who he is and what he wants, is such a foil for David, even as his older acquaintance Jacques, whom David half-despises, tries to show him his possible future. In the final morning, David is left trying to study his reflection in the window as the daybreak makes his reflection fade, a haunting image that will stay with me a long time.

ART: Second Home Serpentine Pavilion at the La Brea Tar Pits

If you’ve driven down Wilshire in recent months, you may have noticed a colorful amorphous installation occupying a large lawn at the La Brea Tar Pits. It’s called the Second Home Serpentine Pavilion, and this piece of art/architecture beckons you to come inside, to follow its non-linear corridors while enjoying the colorful play of light. The structure uses the principles of a tent, with sheets of material stretched out between lightweight poles that define the form. That form is more like a hermit crab’s shell than a normal tent. The sheets are mostly translucent, some in iridescent silver, others bold primary colors. Occasionally, a “panel” is just open air cross-hatched by brightly colored streamers. The reflections, refractions, and stained glass-like illuminations compound the visual fiesta. If you ever wondered what the view of a birthday party might be like from inside one of the mylar balloons, this is it. Where did this come from? Apparently, the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park has hosted an annual event where a creative architect is given the opportunity design and install some kind of pavilion to showcase their creativity in a summer-long installation. This was the 2015 Serpentine Pavilion, by the Madrid-based architects SelgasCano. Now it’s visiting LA through Nov 24.

STAGE: Skintight

We were very glad to have caught the last night of Joshua Harmon’s Skintight at the Geffen Playhouse. It was funny, clever, and leaves you with things to ponder that stay with you after you’ve stopped laughing. Of course it was a treat to see Idina Menzel, who has been with the show since even before the off-Broadway run. (At this point in her career, this is something she would only be doing for the love of it.) Skintight is a very modern family drama. Menzel plays Jodi, whose freshly ex-husband has just married the half-his-age aerobics instructor that he left Jodi for. The play opens with Jodi dropping in on her father, Elliot (Harry Groener), a long-widowed-and-now-gay billionaire fashion designer (a Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfiger type), ostensibly to surprise him for his birthday, but really just looking for some support. Her studying-abroad son Ben (Eli Gelb), also gay, is coming in for the weekend as well. Elliot lives a very ordered life and doesn’t care for surprises, but Jodi’s about to get a surprise herself. Her father’s latest “partner” Trey (Will Brittain) is 20 years old, the same age as her son. That set-up is a rich vein to mine for both drama and laughs, and this play runs with both. Can one love beauty, or is that just lust? Are relationships all transactional at bottom? What do parents owe children, and what do children owe parents? These are just some of the questions that Harmon smuggles in with the comedy, along with a funny observation about the Ten Commandments, and why tens of thousands of Hungarians might have a Jewish name embossed on their skin. Skin turns out to be a running theme, appearing throughout the play figuratively, metaphorically, and literally: Skin as in the depth of beauty, skin as the beauty of youth and betrayer of age (botox notwithstanding), the skin that Trey unreservedly shows off. Skin as a symbol of kinship, the relationships you’re born with and cannot shed. It’s all there in two acts and a great ensemble performance.

ART: The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness (Zak Ové , 2016) at LACMA

British visual artist Zak Ové has created a small army of life-size black figures which have been touring around America before heading to their permanent home in a new sculpture park in Berkshire, England. Recently, the figures have invaded the Cantor Sculpture Garden at LACMA, to striking effect. The figures’ faces are African tribal masks, inscrutable and enigmatic. Their hands are raised at their sides, in a gesture of surrender, or perhaps “no offense”. Their abstract torsos have four large buttons suggesting a military jacket, but their abstract private bits are hanging out and their feet are bare. The form looks ancient but with subtle modern lines. The material is graphite, an intentional choice by the artist not to use traditional ebony, instead using a “future world black” material. And there’s something magic about the multiplicity. One of these figures would be interesting, but seeing forty of them in formation makes a substantial impression. The placement in the sculpture garden is brilliant. The figures are in an organized formation, in linear rows and columns, standing side by side, all facing the same direction, with a forward guard advancing out of the entry gate and a rear guard descending the stairs from the upper plaza. The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness”, referencing two cultural bookends of the black experience in the New World. (The Masque of Blackness was a 1605 Jacobean court drama done in black-face extoling he inferiority of black-skinned people. Invisible Man is a 1952 novel by Ralph Ellison illuminating the black experience in early 20th century America.) This work’s previous installations have been in open spaces on its own, but I think its intriguing insertion here into the existing sculpture garden adds another layer of meaning to this thought-provoking work. And yet this parade is not all standing cohesively together, rather they are all interleaved among the permanent residents of the garden – the Rodin sculptures and the palm trees. The comparison is really intriguing. The Rodin bronzes are also dark life-size figures, but where Ové’s figures are firmly vertical and stationary, Rodin’s figures twist and sweep with flowing movement. Where the Rodins are arranged “conversationally”, facing each other and facing the central walkway, the masked figures face forward, eyes forward, like soldiers at attention trained not to look at those who are looking at them. The occupying force mixes with the resident sculptures, close enough to each other to seem to be in dialogue, and yet they are oblivious to each other, as if they occupy different dimensions in the same space. The title of the work is “The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness”, referencing two cultural bookends of the black experience in the New World. (The Masque of Blackness was a 1605 Jacobean court drama done in black-face extoling he inferiority of black-skinned people. Invisible Man is a 1952 novel by Ralph Ellison illuminating the black experience in early 20th century America.) This work’s previous installations have been in open spaces on its own, but I think its intriguing insertion here into the existing sculpture garden adds another layer of meaning to this thought-provoking work.

BOOKS: If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now

There’s a small irony in my using my daily commute time to listen to Christopher Ingraham’s If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now, a charming memoir of a young family, overwhelmed by the expense and commuting toll of living in metro-DC, who gave up everything they knew and moved to a remote community in northwest Minnesota. There’s a large irony just in the story of how they got there. Ingraham is a data analyst journalist for the Washington Post, and several years back, looking for a light summer click bait story, he found a data set that had been produced by the Dept of Agriculture ranking US counties by “attractiveness”, which was quantified by weather data (mild temps, days of sunshine being good) and a survey of geographic features (more mountains, valleys, and shorelines are better). At the top was Ventura County, California. At the bottom, Red Lake County, Minnesota. Needless to say, the 4000 good people who inhabit Red Lake County were hurt to read of their home being declared the “ugliest county in the US”. Ingraham got an earful in his inbox and Twitter feed. But Minnesotans earn their reputation of being scrupulously nice, and rather than invective-filled hate mail, he got photos from beautiful back porch views ironically captioned “view from the ugliest county”, and he even got an invitation to visit. This improbable start lead to Ingraham, his wife, an executive in the Social Security Administration, and their twin toddlers moving to Red Lake Falls. This book tells the story of their decision to give it a try, and why they’re now all in. Much of the book are the engaging foibles of big city folk learning the intricacies of small town life, and the colorful characters they meet there. If you’re imagining A Year in Provence as it might have been written by Garrison Keillor, you’re not far off. There are the expected amusing stories of first time deer hunting and ice fishing, and an assessment of Minnesota cuisine. And while it’s said that eskimos have over a hundred different words for snow, now so too does Ingraham. Being a data analyst, the author peppers his book with interesting statistics to illuminate or bolster many of his observations. But he ends with the lesson that begins the story, that data can’t always tell the whole story, and he offers some thoughtful observations about the value and forms of social fabric, about small town politics and why “dispatches from the red states” are often misleading, and ultimately why his family has found unexpected reward in trading urban life for prairie life.

BOOKS: The Alchemist: A Fable About Finding Your Dreams

Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream was a charming way to pass several hours of highway driving. It was kind of a cross between Tales of the Alhambra and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Like Washington Irving’s Tales, it is slightly magical and set in some non-specific past that suits fables and fairy tales. And like the Tales, it begins in Andalusia and trades in fantastical Moorish characters, though this story actually crosses the Straits of Gibraltar and travels to North Africa. It resembles Jonathan Livingston Seagull in being infused with a New Age pseudo-religious philosophy that can seem captivating at first blush, enthusiastically packaged in a charming story. Just don’t think about it too hard, or the gossamer profundity dissipates, and you might start to wonder how the girl in the oasis is really any different than the merchant’s daughter in Tarifa (the Rosaline for this Andalusian shepherd’s Romeo), or whether personal legends are only for boys, or whether the mildly unwieldy phrase “personal legend” worked better in the original Portuguese. (Darn it, I let myself think about it too much.) In the end, the philosophical treasure to be gleaned from this book is no more nor less than the wisdom dispensed by the Mother Superior in the Sound of Music when she sings Climb Every Mountain. And you like that song, right? So just enjoy the tale of the enterprising Andalusian shepherd in search of travel, adventure, and treasure, and before you know it, you’ll have driven a few hundred miles.

FILM: Downton Abbey

OMG, the new Downton Abbey film was wonderful!!! Julian Fellowes is still at the top of his game. Even though he had neatly "tucked in" all of the characters at the end of the TV show, he still had a delightfully intriguing set of plot lines, with some good twists and revelations, to propel all of our beloved characters through various challenges and machinations, and to wrap them up neatly in the end. With the cinematic scale of a film, the palatial estate was even more of a star, including some swooning aerial shots. The opening sequence sets the scene magnificently, showing the progress of a letter sent from Buckingham Palace, the mail on a train steaming up to Yorkshire, then on a truck with loving sweeping shots through Downton Village, then a mail carrier bringing it to the estate, with the theme music building to crescendo as the iconic Abbey comes into view, and finally getting passed along from footman to butler to lord as we get our first look at all our favorite characters. With an impending royal visit, Anglophile viewers are amply rewarded with royal pageantry, and the house is thrown into a tizzy with preparations, but that only scratches the surface of the delicious plot complications. Oh, it was good! I'll be dreaming about it for weeks.

STAGE: Latin History for Morons

John Leguizamo is a vivacious and compelling teacher in his one-man show “Latin History for Morons”, playing now at the Ahmanson. The motivating premise for this “lesson” is that Leguizamo’s young son is getting bullied at school for being a “beaner” while struggling with an assignment to find a historical hero to write about. As a father, John despairs at the lack of Latinx heroes in his son’s history textbooks, prompting him to do some reading of his own. Thus ensues a lively recount of Latin contributions to American history, going back to Inca and Mayan roots, to undersung characters like Loreta Janeta Velázquez, a Cuban-American woman who disguised herself as a man to fight in the Civil War. The lesson is filled with a barrage of laughs, and I have to say I don’t think I’ve ever sat with a more “live” audience who were laughing out loud, whooping, and applauding with gusto. Amidst the laughs, you’ll pick up some interesting information you may not have known, and it might leave you a bit more thoughtful about the importance of visibility and representation.

FILM: Brittany Runs A Marathon

From the fat-girl heroine gags in the trailers, one could easily confuse Brittany Runs A Marathon with the Rebel Wilson film Isn't It Romantic from earlier this year, but the similarities don't run deep. The other film is a romantic comedy cleverly framed as a parody of romantic comedies, while this film is a more earnest look at the challenges, both physical and mental, of being obese. When Brittany finally does run a marathon, it's not a cakewalk, and the film doesn't flinch from showing how grueling a marathon can really be at mile 22, but that only makes it all the more satisfying when she does cross the finish line. (Scant spoiler alert: Brittany runs a marathon.) And that's a metaphor for the whole film, which does have some grueling moments as Brittany struggles not just with her weight, but with her self-perceptions and her ability to see herself as someone worthy of accepting the help of others. Fortunately writer-director Paul Downs Colaizzo's handling of this self-improvement story deftly keeps it mostly light and likable, while also keeping it real but not ponderous. Jillian Bell's portrayal lets us see the sometimes comic tenderness of Brittany's defense mechanisms while conveying Brittany's own unawareness of them. In the end, it's rewarding to see how she gets to the finish line.

BOOKS: Shortest Way Home

Pete Buttigieg’s memoir, Shortest Way Home, is obviously aimed at introducing the candidate to the American electorate, but his whole outlook is such a breath of fresh air, and he is such an extraordinary person, that his book was an absolute pleasure to read (or actually, listen to him read it to me, which is even better). In fact, I’ve listened to it twice through. If you’re not familiar with “Mayor Pete”, the intriguing nutshell is this: born and raised in the “rust belt” town of South Bend, Indiana, he attended Harvard then Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and was on track to become a very rich and very successful business consultant at McKinsey, but a strong desire for a more meaningful career of public service brought him back to Indiana, where he won election as mayor of South Bend, just as Newsweek named it one of America’s “dying cities”. There he has lead the city to a resurgence of economic growth, new investment, elimination of blight, and turned abandoned auto factories into a “Silicon Prairie”. He also publicly came out as gay shortly before standing for re-election, and shortly after returning from seven months in Afghanistan as a Navy Reserve lieutenant. But that’s just the teaser. The real joy of this book is learning what shaped him, seeing how such seemingly divergent aspects all converge in one person. As he tells his story, a dazzlingly brilliant mind powered by an engaging curiosity is on display, but disarmingly tempered with an earnest humility. He’s up front with many lessons learned through hard experience, and he’s quick to give credit and praise to others. He’s also clearly a man in love, and some of the best parts are when he’s talking about the object of his love. There’s a beautiful chapter about how he met and courted his husband, but long before that, his first-and-always love is his native city of South Bend. The first chapter of the book, called “The South Bend I Grew Up In”, is a free-ranging and at times elegiac description of the city’s 150-year history interwoven with his own experiences growing up in it. In later chapter, he takes the reader along on his morning run, and it’s like getting a personal tour of the city from its biggest fan. I can’t say South Bend had ever been on my bucket list before, but he makes it sound compelling. Of course there’s politics in this book, but politics at a city level reflects little of the red/blue partisan divide, and is much more about pragmatic problem solving like how best to clean up a blighted neighborhood, how best to revitalize a dying city, or simply how to get the snow plowed. As mayor of a city in a very red state, he talks about how he worked successfully with Republican governors, even Mike Pence. There were lessons there in how being too committed to ideology can get in the way of getting good things done. His closing chapter is a musing about if he could go back in time to see the South Bend of previous generations, and if he could bring the mayors of those eras into the present, what those conversations would be like. And in the process, he talks about the myth of the “golden age”, and why wanting to go back to a time when a mighty Studebaker factory employed a thriving city, looking for another Studebaker to “make South Bend great again”, is “looking for greatness in all the wrong places”. Rather than looking to the past for specific solutions, expecting that what worked well for past challenges would work again for the very different set of present challenges, what works is to apply the same grit and creativity used in past successes to come up with new solutions appropriate to our time and place. It’s a fittingly optimistic and forward-looking grace note to close his book.

Exploring Westwood Memorial Park

For years I had heard about this quiet little cemetery hidden behind tall buildings in the middle of Westwood, which boasts the graves of many Hollywood luminaries, perhaps the most notable being Marilyn Monroe. You really have to know that it's there, because it isn't visible from any street, and the only entrance is a modestly marked driveway between two buildings. There's a nice lawn area in the center with all flat stones, and some columbariums and a few mausoleums around the edges. Marilyn, as I learned, is in an above-ground niche which you can locate by looking for a niche with lots of lipstick kisses on it. While Marilyn's niche may have a kiss or two, it is the adjacent niche belonging to Hugh Hefner that's covered in kisses. It seems that Hefner laid out big bucks to be forever beside his first Playboy centerfold, even though the two never actually met in life. There are a lot of stories here. In another above ground niche, I found Truman Capote interred with Joanne Carson, ex-wife of Johnny Carson. They were apparently best friends, and Capote died in a room at Carson's home where he did a lot of his writing. It's not clear to me whether his ashes are actually in there, as I found at least one story claiming that his ashes were sold at auction by Carson's estate. Some stones celebrate comedians who gave us laughs to their very end. Rodney Dangerfield's grave is inscribed "there goes the neighborhood", while Merv Griffin's grave says "I will not be right back after this message". Some graves, like Don Knotts, have lovely graphical tributes. Some, like Bob Crane and his wife and Hogan's Heroes co-star Sigrid Valdis, have entire obituaries with photos. Others, like Donna Reed, are very simple and easy to miss. I found many stars just on my random walk, but I need to go back, as there were many that I missed, including Natalie Wood, Fanny Brice, Dean Martin, Jack Lemmon, Eva Gabor, Billy Wilder, Carroll O'Connor, Walter Matthau, George C. Scott, and more.

ART: Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel at the Hammer

A Hammer Museum retrospective of the British artist Sarah Lucas entitled "Au Naturel" showcases her playfully provocative explorations of sex. As the title suggests, naked bodies, or at least parts of them will be shown here, some more abstract and some less so. A series called "bunnies" involves panty hose which have been stuffed to resemble women's legs seeming to sprout from office chairs, which also have protrusions that could be bunny ears although they are rather phallic in appearance and seem to be diving toward the crotch of the legs. These creatures are all arranged around and on a "snooker" table (like billiards), and the stockings are colored to match the snooker balls. It somehow manages to be erotic, whimsical, and thoughtful all at the same time. As you try to make sense of it, you can't help but think about the relationship between woman and office chairs, or how women can be seen in the "male gaze" as just crotches and legs, or how this all relates to snooker halls. And what is up with those "bunny ears"? They're clearly phallic, but they also breast-like in some ways. This kind of challenge pervades the show, rich with thoughtful symbolism. In another room, a life-size Christ on the cross is constructed entirely of cigarettes. Christ looks down on a giant plaster phallus mounted atop a pile of car wreckage. The phallus is aimed at a wallpaper print of a woman's midsection wearing only knickers, with a raw chicken suggestively placed. After the initial shock, one might start to think about sexuality, danger, death, and commodification. In this Freudian space, of course, a cigarette is never just a cigarette. It's a cancer stick, it's a phallus, and it's a cliche post-coital pleasure. Of course since Lucas's creatures generally comprise only below-the-neck body parts, they smoke out of other orifices. Wandering through this show might make you smile and might make you a little uncomfortable at the same time, but it's certainly worth engaging with.

FILM: Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

Cate Blanchett gives a great performance as Bernadette, a Macarthur grant genius architect who moves to Seattle and has a creative breakdown. We already knew that Cate could portray a breakdown, but where Blue Jasmine was a harsh and unsympathetic breakdown, Bernadette is much more summer-light endearing kind of crazy, so that you’re rooting for her rather than watching a trainwreck. The story is fresh, and proceeds enjoyably, to an improbable ending which is satisfying enough for a light summer movie. Our expectations going in had been lowered by rather mixed reviews, and from reading some of the unfavorable ones, I’m guessing that the film departs a fair bit from the book, particularly in its Hollywood resolution. We never read the book, so we just took the film on its own terms. If you’re expecting high art or profound social commentary, you’d be disappointed, but if you just want a light summer film and don’t think too hard about it, it’s plenty enjoyable.

Sonoratown, St Vincent Court, The Last Bookstore, and Biddy Mason Park

With the 2019 Masa Madness Tortilla Tournament down to its Suave Sixteen, I was reminded that I had yet to taste the winner of last year’s tournament, the legendary flour tortillas of Sonoratown. So this morning I headed to DTLA to rectify that. Arriving at 11:05am, I found there was already a line out the door and down the street, but it was a beautiful morning and the delicious aroma from the grill wafted out onto the street to give those of us in line a hint of tastes to come. The reward came on a plate with a taco de costilla (grilled slices of beef rib), a chorizo quesadilla, and a small bean and cheese burrito. I appreciated that the items are modestly sized, enabling me to sample three different expressions of their flour tortillas without being too much of a pig. Yes, flour tortillas are what it’s all about here, in the style of Sonora (northern Mexico), pressed thin, supple, and made extra delicious with generous brown stripes from the grill. An excellent complement to the grilled beef with a hint of mesquite smoke, and the crispy chorizo with its chile heat. This was all enjoyed with an horchata (they use coconut milk to make the rice starch creamier) and norteño music. Close your eyes and you could be in the chef’s hometown of San Luis Rio Colorado, just south of the Arizona border. Open your eyes, and see the line of people a multicolored array of Hispanic, African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and European ancestry, and you know you’re in LA.

After brunch, I explored a few DTLA sites I’d heard about. If you’re walking along 7th St between Broadway and Hill, there’s a mid-block service alley that at some point got transformed into a kitschy little faux European street called St. Vincent Court. The alley is paved in brick, and it is lined with brightly painted shopfronts with sidewalk tables and chairs. It’s as if you stepped through a portal from DTLA to Solvang, but less specific about which European country, with bits of Italian, French, German all quaintly jumbled. Behind the cute storefronts lie a couple of delis, a half-dozen kebab places (I’m guessing that the clientele from the surrounding jewelry markets must be heavily middle-Eastern), a pizzeria, and Café Bonjour (with its hospitable Asian proprietor), where I took an espresso and enjoyed watching the life on this quirky little street.

I wandered up to Broadway, and took a peek at the old Warner Brothers Theater. Broadway is full of the remains of once-grand movie houses, and you can see remnants of the marquees and the terrazzo in the sidewalk. What used to be the Warner Brothers Theater is now the Theater Jewelry Exchange, a marketplace of jewelry shops and stalls. But walk into the stalls and look up, and you can see the ornate ceiling of the classic movie palace. Here and there you can spot brass fixtures and chandeliers. The big red curtain is even still there. It’s an odd juxtaposition with its present use, stalls set up where the audience would have sat 80 years ago.

At 5th and Spring, I came to The Last Bookstore, an impressive independent bookstore occupying a good quarter of a downtown block on two floors, filled with new and used books, the shelves peppered with comfy chairs. (Admittedly, it’s not Powell’s, but it’s pretty good.) It has some fun curiosities as well: a tunnel made of old books stacked into a long arch, an old bank vault housing the horror section, and several shelves of “decorative books”, organized by color and size.

In the block between Spring and Broadway and 3rd and 4th, I found an open space amidst the buildings with some plantings, a fountain, some nice places to sit, and a long granite wall memorializing a rather remarkable woman named Biddy Mason. She was born a slave in Mississippi in 1818, followed with her owner’s family on a Mormon migration to Utah and then California, where she petitioned for and won her freedom. She worked in Los Angeles as a nurse and midwife, delivering hundreds of babies. She saved diligently and invested in real estate near downtown Los Angeles (including the land where this small park is), making a small fortune, and becoming a major philanthropist as well as a co-founder of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles and the first elementary school for black children in Los Angeles. The granite wall has a timeline of the 1800s with events in Biddy Mason’s life aligned with events in the growth of this part of Los Angeles. What an impressive woman!

FILM: Blinded By The Light

Blinded By The Light tells us the story of Javed Khan, a Pakistani-British teen living in the English town of Luton in the late 1980s, whose dreams of being a writer clash with his parents’ more traditional values. When he discovers an unexpected source of inspiration in the songs of Bruce Springsteen, it propels him on a path to finding success and finding himself. The film is straightforward dramatic cinematography interspersed with a few musical numbers where the characters of the film burst into song and dance (like Rocketman), and a few music video-like sequences with lyrics captioned on screen, devices which effectively convey how powerfully the Boss's lyrics speak to Javed. The film captures the time of 1980s Thatcherite Britain when Wham and the Pet Shop Boys were bursting on the music scene and the Nationalist Front was rousing ugly anti-immigrant demonstrations. The film is mostly light, but doesn't mask the ugliness of the nationalists confronting the Pakistani immigrants in their town. In one particularly powerful scene, a wedding party crosses paths with an NF march which turns into a small riot, as a giant billboard of Margaret Thatcher with the slogan "Unite England / Vote Conservative" looks down over the mayhem. While the plot elements are broadly familiar and unsurprising, the story is told from a very fresh and original perspective, with endearing performances, and is a pure joy to watch it unfold.

The Velaslavasay Panorama and the Cristo del Arbol de la Calle 22

So on Friday, I checked out a few of LA’s lesser known attractions. The Velaslavasay Panorama is a kind of a throwback to a previous century before movies, when some creative artists recreated the travel experience by means of a large 360-degree panoramic painting, augmented with model-train-like scenic dioramas in front of the painting. If you remember the old “America The Beautiful” 360-degree movie at Disneyland, these panoramas are something like that, but with a painting rather than a movie. The experience is enhanced with dynamic lighting and a soundtrack, so that as you wander around the panorama, you hear ambient sounds – people talking, birds, crickets, street noise, passing trains – and over the course of a half-hour you might see day turn to night and back again. It’s quaint and charming (think of the Disneyland Railroad diorama), and for people 100 years ago who didn’t have benefit of the Travel Channel, the device can give you a surprisingly decent sense of place. The currently installed panorama is of Shengjing, a city in the Northeast of China, as it was circa 1920. It had been installed in an old Chinese restaurant in Hollywood, but the whole thing has been installed now at the Union Theatre in West Adams, itself a bit of local history: built in 1910 as one of the first movie houses, it was later used as a play house, and then a hall for the tile workers’ union local. The main theatre space still looks as it did in 1920, with an old organ about to accompany the silent film, and a side stage for a puppet show at intermission. The panorama is above. You enter via a spiral staircase that comes up in the middle, where you suddenly find yourself atop a hill in the middle of northern China. After enjoying the panorama, the funky Asian garden in back, and another diorama of an Arctic trading post, I was about to head home when I learned I was only a couple blocks away from the Cristo del Arbol de la Calle 22. Of course I had to see what that was. Apparently, on a modest West Adams residential street, there was an old dead tree between the sidewalk and the curb that some guy looked at and saw possibility. So he carved the crucified Jesus out of the tree. From the waist down, you still see the tree trunk, but above you see a nice folk art carving of Jesus, two branches in the perfect configuration for his outstretched arms, painted with stigmata. It’s become a local shrine, with a protective covering, and offerings of flowers and toys left for Jesus of the Tree of 22nd Street.

BOOKS: Becoming

I’ve had the pleasure of having Michelle Obama in my car for the last several weeks, telling me her life story. Her book Becoming is a great telling of a remarkable life, and I especially enjoyed hearing it in her own voice. She vividly describes the Southside neighborhood she grew up in, and the people that surrounded her there, from her admirably gritty parents and protective older brother to all the extended family members, neighbors, schoolmates, teachers, and other characters in her story. She went from an underprivileged beginning to graduating from Harvard and being recruited into a top law firm, and while she makes it clear where it took grit and hard work to get there, she is equally clear on her indebtedness to the many other people who provided opportunity, encouragement, or inspiration along the way. It’s a theme throughout the book recognizing where the course of her life benefited from active help or influential examples, and being mindfully grateful to them. I found each chapter of her life interesting to hear about: the student from the South Side slowly finding her confidence in the wider world at a selective “magnet” high school and then Princeton University, the Harvard Law alum landing a job at a top law firm but then wondering about finding true fulfillment and a sense of social contribution in her work, the successful public sector executive wrestling with how to balance career and motherhood, the non-politics-loving spouse of a rising political star getting drawn into an all-consuming political campaign, and finally the First Lady finding her own way to carry out that unofficial role with its own heap of expectations. You’ll find some politics in here, as would be inevitable given the course of her remarkable life, but not as much as you might think. (By the time she stated explicitly near the end, it was not the least surprise to hear that no, she has no intention of ever running for President herself.) You’ll also find plenty of interesting stories of what it’s like to live in the White House and enveloped by a Secret Service cocoon (like “Hi, this is Sasha’s Mom, Sasha would love to come to that play date if you wouldn’t mind providing the social security numbers and birthdates of everyone in your household and letting the Secret Service sweep your house beforehand…”). But ultimately, I think her book is a distinctive perspective contributing to the never-ending conversation on balancing career, family, and fulfillment. There were moments when I got teary-eyed (like the loss of her father, or the loss way too young of a college friend), and in the end I was teary from painfully missing have such a good and decent family in the White House.

STAGE: The Play That Goes Wrong

Sometimes we go to the theatre to be moved, inspired, or challenged, but sometimes we just go to be entertained and have a good hearty laugh. The Play That Goes Wrong, now playing at the Ahmanson Theatre, delivers the latter in spades. We laughed heartily and non-stop. This play is about an earnest but hapless college drama society attempting to stage a murder mystery play, and “Murder at Haversham Manor” (the play within the play) is as brilliant a drama as Fawlty Towers is a hotel. The mayhem begins even before the play officially begins, with last minute set repairs laid bare, and “production staff” roving the audience in search of last minute props and a lost dog, and even drawing an audience member or two into the gags as semi-witting participants. Every conceivable angle of “so bad it’s good” acting is mined, along with every form of actor’s nightmares, from forgotten lines, missing props, missed cues, dialog loops, and set malfunctions. Despite a cavalcade of mishaps, the unstoppable actors rally to their hilarious conclusion. The prowess of the actual actors in executing such extraordinary timing and physical comedy feats is impressive, rivaled only by the stage set itself which is an amazing piece of comic machinery. Not since Noises Off has a watching a play go wrong been such good fun.

FILM: Straight Up

Writer-director-actor James Sweeney’s first feature film, Straight Up, made a good impression at OutFest last night. The protagonist Todd is endearingly neurotic and OCD, and after having calculated the improbability of his finding the perfect man (his own gay romance version of the Drake equation), wonders if he should make a go at having a relationship with Rory, an aspiring actress with a wit and baggage that matches his. It seems they’re three-quarters ideal for each other, but can they round it up? The dialog is rapid-fire clever, heady and hilarious, and there may never have been more sparks between two people who didn’t feel that spark (at least not since Cat On a Hot Tin Roof). The backdrop for this is the Los Angeles populated by waiter-actor-model-serial-housesitters and the occasional software engineer. The film manages to be simultaneously earnest and irreverent about romance, about LA, and about rom-coms (whose tropes it enacts while parodying). Sweeney and Katie Findlay (Rory) remind me of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in their best years (if one may be permitted to recall Woody Allen before he was creepy), and other notable actors just add to the party, like Tracie Thoms as Sweeney’s deadpan therapist. Fresh, original, and a delight from beginning to end.

FILM: The Farewell

Lulu Wang’s The Farewell is a story not just about the distinctly Chinese way that one family faced the end of life of a beloved grandmother, but the conflicting values and sensibilities that lie in the hyphen of a Chinese-American immigrant family. As the movie opens, we are told that it is “based on an actual lie”. When the grandmother is diagnosed with late terminal cancer, the family decides it is best not to tell her, and then concocts an excuse around a hastened wedding so that the globally scattered family can all be together again, and to say their goodbyes to “Nai Nai” (Chinese for grandma) while trying not to cry or to say goodbye out loud. The situation is fraught and funny enough on its own, and Wang’s portrayal is appropriately restrained. She neither plays up comedy (though there are some funny moments), nor manipulates for tears, and doesn’t flinch from the awkward moments (like some painfully unjoyful wedding toasts). Neither does she flinch from subtitles, which only enhance the film, not only be being more authentic, but by underscoring that some characters speak English and some don’t, and how that is used at times to talk around someone in their presence. The film turns on watching this emotional charade play out, and on watching granddaughter Billi, who moved to America when she was six, struggle with the rest of her family over whether this “good lie” is a good idea. This performance is a whole new level in Awkwafina’s rising career, complemented by Diana Lin as Billy’s mother, who keeps her emotions below the surface, and Shuzhen Zhou who is a radiant Nai Nai. There is so much in this film that seems so authentic, it reminded me so much of a Chinese friend’s family whom I got to know on a trip to Asia. There are small moments in the film that are especially touching – the scene of the family visiting the grandfather’s grave; Billy looking suddenly bereft and nostalgic out of a taxi’s rear window when she recognizes a glimpse of a childhood landmark surrounded by new development that obliterated where her old neighborhood once was. And I love the film’s opening scene. Billi is on the phone with her Nai Nai, in a way that makes clear they talk often. “What’s that noise in the background? Nai Nai, where are you?” “It’s nothing, it’s just the neighbor.” (She’s in a hospital waiting room.) “It’s so cold in New York. Are you wearing a hat?” “Yes, Nai Nai.” (She’s not.) In the first few minutes, we already see the small lies that can be part of loving family relationships.

FOOD: Anniversary tasting menu dinner at Auburn

Auburn is a new tasting menu restaurant, recently opened in the space on Melrose that used to be Hatfield’s and the legendary Citrus before that, giving it much to live up to. But with good buzz, I thought it would be a fitting place for an anniversary dinner. The space harkens Citrus in its balance of stylish refinement and California patio casual. Done in modernist Scandinavian tones (light wood and glass), the main dining room has an open skylight in the center with an acacia tree and live greenery, and other skylights keep the room bathed in beautiful natural light. The kitchen is wide open so you can see the woodfire stove in one corner and you can watch the bustling team of molecular gastronomists not only cooking the food but arranging it artistically so that every dish is perfectly Instagrammable. (George noticed that their aprons had little breast pockets for three different sizes of tweezers.) Rather than completely dictate your meal, as tasting menus usually do, Auburn lets you chart your own course by offering twelve dishes on any given day and letting you choose your own way through four, six, or nine courses from the twelve on offer. We opted for the six-course, which felt about right (and ended up being an enjoyable 3.5 hour dinner). Of course there are wine pairings, with a curated option or a more adventurous private sommelier consultation option. We just went for the curated option, which was a plenty interesting array of wines thoughtfully chosen to pair with each course.

We began the meal with two amuses bouches. One was a tiny corn tartelette in a little buckwheat crust (or a gluten-free lettuce wrap for George) topped with microgreens and tiny flowers. The other was essentially chicharrones (cracklings) made from pork rind sliced very thin so that they came out crispy but light and delicate. Bread arrived shortly after, a beautiful artisanal sourdough small round for me and gluten-free bread specially made by the pastry chef for George, along with a delicious avocado butter with a tart pool of minced shiso in oil. Our first wine came, a crisp minerally vinho verde which conjured a memory of a seaside cliff top in Portugal where we dined on freshly caught fish. Vinho verde is a lovely fish wine, but here it was complementing our first cold starter, a bowl of julienne curls of cucumber and nectarine with oxalis leaves, wetted with verbena kombucha, and with lightly set curds. The mild tartness of the curds set off the cool freshness of the cucumber. Our second wine was a white garnacha with a fruity floral nose from the bit of viognier blended in. Our second course was a cold stone bowl holding delicate hiramasa crudo with thin slices of purple radish, mulberries, and tiny sprigs of citrus fern, swimming in a pool of bright green cold celery broth. After the fish was gone, I spooned up every drop of that celery broth. On the third course we diverged. George took another cold dish, Brandywine tomatoes and Santa Barbara box crab meat with nasturtium leaves and a seaweed lemon granita, paired with a getariako txakolina, a lightly effervescent wine with green apple notes from the Basque coast near San Sebastian. Meanwhile I moved on to warm dishes. Black cod fresh from the Channel Islands was cooked in brown butter, giving it a light butter-browned crust, served in a sauce made from butter and stock of the fish bones smoked over embers, topped with watercress microgreens, matched with a chardonnay from Chablis with round acid and fruit. I was glad to have a hunk of bread to soak up every last bit of that sauce. For our fourth courses, George had the cod while I took a succulent koji-aged Liberty duck breast with large grilled cherries, their sweetness offset by mustard seeds and a bed of mustard greens, nicely complemented by a Langhe Nebbiolo with its own cherry notes. For our fifth, we diverged again. George took a dry-aged ribeye steak, plated in a rich dark pool with morel mushrooms, kombu, and Australian black truffle, with a glass of deep fruity reserva rioja. Me, I was intrigued by a savory cheese course: Époisses, a very soft and pungent cheese from Burgundy, was warmed a poured over roasted sunchokes, a brilliant pairing further enhanced with a microplane shower of black truffle. Sunchoke, like artichoke, can be a challenge for wine pairing, notwithstanding pungent cheese and truffles, but this was beautifully solved with an Arbois vin jaune, an unusual wine from the Jura mountains between Burgundy and the Swiss border, matured under a yeast film, giving it its distinctive amber color and a flavor like a dry fino sherry. We converged for our last course, a dessert with some unexpected savory elements that worked well: a dollop of fresh tart yogurt in a shallow pool of dark caramel, the syrup deglazed with mushroom stock and a splash of pernod, and garnished with tiny delicate candied fennel fronds. With this, we imbibed a ratafia champenois, a fortified wine made from Champagne must, with raisiny notes that complemented the mushroom caramel nicely. Finally, as I sipped an espresso, we were brought mignardises of little candied rhubarb batons with tiny yellow flower petals to close our grand celebratory meal.

ART: Allure of Matter: Material Art From China @ LACMA

The new exhibition at LACMA “The Allure of Matter: Material Art From China” showcases a wealth of creativity from Chinese artists working in a variety of materials from porcelain and wood to tobacco, ash, and human hair. It seems audacious to try to make a sculpture of a spreading fire, but that’s what Liu Jianhua has done in “Black Flame”, working in porcelain to make eight thousand black “tongues” of flame of varying height placed around the floor of the first gallery I entered as if the room were on fire. Crossing the room with these black flames on both sides reminded me of the videos of people last summer fleeing Paradise, California with flames on both sides of the road. On one wall of this room were three large white rectangles entitled “Blank Paper”, which looked like just that except that they too were made of porcelain. These two works filled the room, in an interesting conversation between black and white, dynamic and static, timeless and fleeting. The center of another large room was mostly occupied with a very large orange-and-white “tiger skin” shag rug, though when I approached, I did a double-take to realize that artist Xu Bing had created this “rug” from carefully arranging thousands of cigarettes. “1st Class” not only creates a fascinating play of color as you look at it from different angles, seeing alternately the white and orange cigarette paper or the darker tobacco seen from “head on”, but it also suggests a conceptual play of consumerism (a mansion-size rug nominally made of possibly endangered animal pelts) as a carcinogen. A couple of other works by Xu also feature tobacoo, including a traditional Chinese scroll painting of a village and river, with a single forty-foot long cigarette running down the middle of it with the end having burnt and stained the painting. Chen Zhen, an artist battling cancer, perhaps inspired by chemotherapy or ancient Chinese medicine, crafted some beautiful crystal sculptures that turned out to be internal organs, an anatomy textbook rendered in sparkling transparent crystal. Song Dong’s “Traceless Stele”, a blank metallic slab monument equipped with water and paintbrushes invites its viewers to engage with it, dipping the paintbrushes into water and drawing or writing inscriptions on the monument which last only a moment before the water evaporates, as you contemplate the nature of temporal existence. One artist has collected human hair from all over the world to weave it into a flag symbolizing multi-cultural harmony, while another artist has collected ash from burnt incense in a temple and painstakingly sorted it by color and coarseness in order to create “paintings” on canvas from it. Yet another artist collected roof tiles from traditional homes that were being demolished in Beijing, and attached to each a black and white photo of a scene from the site where each tile was collected, to create a kind of concrete quilt memorializing neighborhoods that no longer exist. Some of these works could be understood just by looking at them, while others were more conceptual, requiring reading the description to understand the significance of the materials and the process. So many of them were fascinating. I found myself raptly engaged in several of them, and revisited a few. (As so often, a hat tip to KCRW's Edward Goldman for the recommendation.)

July 4th, 2019

On the eve of our nation’s 243rd birthday, I think about what America represents to the world, as a nation uniquely founded on a set of Enlightenment ideas governed by a Constitution, not embedded in tribalism and traditional authority. It has been a shared commitment to those ideals that has bound us together through our relatively brief history. We have no common ethnicity nor national religion, so it is only those ideals and the struggle to live up to them that binds us together as an American people. Our founders understood that they themselves fell short of fully living up to the ideals they proclaimed, but had faith that the shared commitment to those ideals would call upon the better natures of its citizens to make the union “more perfect”. We began as a nation of slaveholders and slavery-enablers, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and went forward from there. We enshrined freedom of speech and of the press in our First Amendment, then one of our first administrations outlawed published criticism of the government, and even as recently as WWI our Supreme Court would endorse criminalization of expressions of anti-war opinion. We prohibited racial discrimination in the hard-won Fourteenth Amendment, but then discriminated by race as we interned Japanese-Americans during WWII. We put up the Statue of Liberty “lifting her lamp beside the golden door”, but then slammed that door shut on Chinese immigrants, and then on southern and eastern Europeans, and then we turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler. We seem to be a nation who proclaims ideals but then takes a good while to catch up in actual practice. That “shining city on a hill” we like to tout is not where we live yet, but it’s a glossy brochure of what we hope to build. We do seem to make slow progress when enough eyes focus on the shared vision. So when I look around today and despair how far short we still fall from our ideals, how far we are from the summit of that shining city, it is useful perspective to turn around and see where we started, and how far we have come. May the ideals that have sustained us so far continue to call us onward and upward. Happy birthday, America!

FILM: Late Night

Mindy Kaling's Late Night is not only really funny, it's a timely skewering of the notoriously white male bastion of the comedy writer's room. Emma Thompson is pitch perfect as a 20-year veteran award winning late night comedy show host who is whip smart and with impeccable standards, but who is also jaded, has lost her edge, and has been coasting a bit on her reputation. When cancellation threatens, an endearingly over-earnest and forthright Mindy Kaling enters to set the late night world right by turning it upside-down. Like a great late night show, there's great comedy here, underpinned by some raw honesty and insight into current affairs. Who knew a writer's room could be so dramatic and so funny?