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.