The Tone is no More

I had completed reading an old favorite from my D train days, the New York Post, delighted that "Page Six" was thriving. I don't see the Post much and the new little sundry place in my building was carrying it. I couldn't resist . I guffawed at the nasty double meaning headline announcing the 12 million inheritance by Trouble, the dog that belonged to the late Leona Helmsley. (My cat is named Trouble. Alas, she won't be receiving such an inheritance upon my demise.) I used to work at one of the Helmsley buildings back in 1980, on Madison and 42nd Street, all marble and ornate polished brass, including the elevator doors.  The Post and my memories brought me back there. Then I switched to the LA Times. And to another memory. It used to be that if you wanted to know the exact time, you called, well, "time", and a soothing voice would say, "At the tone, the time will be 10:39 and 30 seconds". I think it was the same woman's voice throughout the nation, but it sounded personal to me. Sometimes I'd call it, just like this. I hadn't thought about that in years. And how my dad, when fooling around with me, used to say, "I am going to call the little girl down the block, Susan Ann Oliver" and he'd dial and I'd grab the phone and it'd be "time". Got you dad, there is no Susan Ann Oliver. (Actually, he got the name from an actress popular in the 60s; here comes that Star Trek connection again; she was the heroine in the very first pilot, The Cage!). The voice is being stilled. No one needs to call "time" anymore, with precision clocks, panel TVs, computers. At the tone, the time will be past.  

Good People Don't Curse

 

I was near home, about to make a right on a well-travelled boulevard. I had dragged myself through the work day. It had begun, and ended, in an unremitting bad mood which I attribute to the unfolding of events related to some philosophical pet peeve. So, getting into the womb of my apartment was pressing on me. I had taken some less crowded side streets, and was making reasonably good time. Then, a gargantuan SUV ahead of me waited to make a left on the rush hour car filled street. I could divine this by the angle of the metal blockade, since there was no concomitant flashing signal. I cursed. I cursed several times (the one that the celebrities on the Actor's Studio say that they favor), simultaneously rationalizing each curse, as the only proper response to the unseemly ease with which one human being discomfits another As it happened, I was the only human being behind him. It wouldn't have mattered, of course, if there had been twenty of us behind him, the driver would have still blithely blocked the road, and that realization increased my anger. He made his oblivious turn and I made mine. Suddenly, I thought, "Good people don't curse". Then followed the conclusion, "Therefore, I am not good". For the few blocks to my apartment, I became semi-obsessed with what I hoped was mere syllogism, rather than self-condemnatory truth. I haven't read the life of every saint, but I cannot imagine, say, St. Therese of the Little Flower ever having even thought a four letter word let alone saying one repeatedly and with the verve to which I am given. Never mind designated saints, but there are several of my fellow churchgoers, and one in particular, whom I can never picture employing, as Mr. Spock said in Star Trek IV, a "colorful epithet".  I wondered, how do they restrain themselves? This led me back to the unalterable fact that not only are they simply of way better character than I am, but that my semi-public venality was merely one moral lapse of an infinite variety. Luckily, I pulled into my parking space as the implications of that latter thought were about to fully impact me. I considered going to a nearby Mexican restaurant to have several margaritas to dull my mind. But writing this all down seems to have had a quasi-quieting effect.

 

   

 

 

Bowled Over

 

As I sat last night in the Hollywood Bowl, the fourth or fifth time for this summer's season, I knew I would be writing about it today. The sound gift was the jazz stylings of Diana Krall, and if her husky sensual soulful singing has impressed me before, her nimble pianist's fingers almost did more so. It was a perfect interlude. But I have found, for me, that any performance there is perfect, thousands of us somehow intimately held in the cup of carved out mountain caressed by the California breeze and the night desert scents. The occasional insect transects and glistens in the crossed floodlights that remind aircraft to stay away and let the music flow uninterrupted to our senses. If you haven't been there, and you live in the Los Angeles area, go, go, go. Even if it means sitting in the uppermost seats, your soul will be revived by the oasis of countryside. If you haven't been there and you live across the states, I offer this short sharing, one evening's performance amid the trees and the sky, and its semicolon clouds easing above us with our friends and our wine and our picnic baskets or concession purchased goodies, Patina catered. As Diana deliciously crooned "I've Got You Under My Skin" or her enlightened version of the Bee Gees, "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart", I swayed to the music and my own meandering thoughts and wished the summer would never end.

Someone once called these moments "glimpses of paradise". Indeed.

 

 

Tags: Hollywood Bowl, great LA sites, summer in LA

The Downside of Progress

Some days ago, I was revelling in the development of downtown Los Angeles. As I write this, I continue to revel. But always, there are two sides, are there not? As I was driving home on Monday along Sunset Boulevard I came upon the fenced in remnant of a long time restaurant fixture. At first I did not realize that it had been The Old Spaghetti Factory.

This was probably the second restaurant I had my first visit to California a brief vacation in my New York graduate school days'.  The first was "The Copper Penny" also on Sunset circa the late 1970's. The Spaghetti Factory had basic pasta food. It was nothing cosmic culinary speaking, but the kitschy atmosphere, lots of Tiffany lamps, overstuffed furniture, alcoves that included brass bed stands made part of a table, a faux train car with long table for large parties, was incredibly comforting. It was a place that all ages could enjoy. A friend of mine had self-thrown birthday gatherings there for something like 10 or more years right up to this May. In building and growing, as good as that is, a city absorbs some casualties that maybe, if somebody was not thinking entirely in greenback terms, would not be necessary. Maybe some of the losses are just too big, and maybe, in more reflective moments, they temper my joy at the growth I see in places that heretofore were concrete deserts. Maybe it is because we are such a young country and nothing is really old to us and so the idea of sparing something 50 or 100 or 150 years old just isn't a priority. There are groups out there, pockets of people, who will battle to save something, like say, the old May Co. on Fairfax and Wilshire,

where Gracie Allen used to shop, now part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but, there are not enough of them, and too many storied places to save. So, we are not like the Italians, whose modern buildings are often built over ruins thousands of years old. It doesn't hurt us enough to tear down some 40s movie theatre. That's what 67 years. Big deal! Oh, but it is when you see photos of those places that are gone now, that you never saw, and visualize those places you did get a chance to see before they were taken away. It's like taking away the connection to the past, to the people who passed those doors, whose lives surrounded those places. That's why going to Europe is so astounding, because here you are in exactly the place, with some of the same stones, often entire buildings, that was literally touched by a Michelangelo, or a Prince, or a King of ages past. It's a little bit of knowing them.

So, I got to thinking of some of the places that are lost now to posterity--not all huge things or places, in LA, a lot of it Hollywood related. The original Brown Derby (there were several, the only one I actually went to in the early 80s was around Hollywood and Vine) was on Wilshire, across from the Ambassador (now a reduced unrecognizable version of itself, the remains apparently to form the center of the school that will built there at some point) is now the "Brown Derby" shopping center. A pathetic derby is painted on the signage. There used to be a big doorway shaped in the form of a derby that entered the restaurant filled with celebrities and their photographs. 

 

The strip mall that long ago replaced it is a cacophany of fast food eateries. Diagonally across the street there are more fast food eateries for the business people who rush through their lunches. How many of these do we need, truly?

How long has Chasen's been closed? Ten years, five? I can no longer remember. Turns out 17. 

Its center was also left intact so that a Bristol Farms could be built surrounding it, across the street from a 24 hour Ralph's. I content myself with the one lunch and one dinner I shared with friends there after the Chasen heirs announced the landmark would soon be no more. They were still using chafing dishes and sterno, a lovely fifties glimmer of how things used to be done in the glamor days. I can still taste my filet mignon, with a perfect bearnaise sauce. A lovely pastiche of the Old Hollywood my generation and those who have followed missed.

Somewhere in my old polaroids from 1977 or 1978, I have a picture of the original Schwab's. By then, it too had been closed, and was an architectural ghost. The Virgin

Records Stores stands on that Hollywood hallowed ground near Crescent Heights.

 

It's not that I don't love the mega media store. I do. I love the techno glitz too. But why does one have to die to bring the other to life? The Grove kind of got it right, keeping a part of the old Farmer's Market adjacent to what I hear is THE most popular shopping center in the United States. I can't live without those dented metal tables and Patsy's Pizza (if you are from New York, as I am, this is the real deal).

Some things just plain confuse me. Since 1965 there has been a restaurant (with various names) on the 32nd story of what used to be the Occidental, then the Transamerica, then the SBC, now the AT and T Building.  Back then, some important people from Stanford University did a million dollar study and opined that downtown LA would be centered where this first skyscraper was built between Hill and Olive, 11th and 12th. Only it did not happen for nearly 50 years. And now the sparks of residential and business life are finally growing around the building. The restaurant, with its always spectacular view in every direction, was closed on July 31 purportedly to make executive offices for oodles more profit, when to those of us regulars it seemed like this was the time for the restaurant to redefine and shine.

The other day I ran across the name of one of the many old theatres, this one in Long Beach, which is developing mightily these days so that the ocean is virtually blocked out of view unless you own one of those million dollar condos. It was called the Fox West Coast Theatre. I looked up where it had been, 333 Ocean Boulevard. They even took the statue outside the theatre and made it part of the current building, which itself, I think was probably built in the 1960s, because that's when the ornate theatre that aspiring actors and actresses from the Long Beach Community Playhouse used to frequent, was torn down.

I have no answer for what should be done. It's easy for me to say preserve, preserve! And anyway what is the difference in the large scheme of things? Sometimes, though, the loss just makes me sad.

 

 

 

The Past is Present

I have a picture on my wall of about 30 smiling toothless six year olds, of which I am one. We had just made our First Holy Communions. It was May 21, 1961. I have kept in touch with maybe two of those girls, with the occasional Christmas card, and, in later years, e-mail, but I had not seen either of them since the 1970s, the end of high school and beginning of college. The rest faded into a sort of one-dimensional fragmented memory of the girls of the Mount in the Bronx before the 60s revolutions, before the Beatles, before Vatican II, before any of us were formed beyond reading Dick and Jane, trying to remember to bring our chapel veils for First Friday Mass and getting promoted to the next grade.

And then V said she was coming for a couple day trip to Long Beach, California, would I maybe come down and meet her for dinner? Over tapas, at Allegria's on Pine, 3000 miles away and 45 years later, the little girls took form again as we reminisced about our own lives and the tides and eddies of some of theirs, to the extent we could remember or had continued contact with them beyond those innocent days.

I hadn't known very much about V's background, and she regaled me with tales from getting herself locked in one of the yes, wooden, lockers on the first floor of the Mount during an air raid drill (I am from the generation that ducked and covered, under flimsy desks and heads in front of lockers that would likely have fallen on us as the fall out was wafting about us) to her father's two ended candle burning prior to his too early death in Vietnam to her third marriage to truly her best friend. And then we remembered moments with each of the girls who had been our first friends in life, tried to remember some last names, and wondered what had become of them. I told a story about A, well it was really about me, but A had played a significant part. It was forbidden for the first graders to speak in the girls' bathroom, then discretely denominated the "lavatory". I think it was forbidden right through grammar school. I never thought to ask why. If Mother Ursula said it was forbidden, it was, and probably for biblical reasons harking all the way back to Adam, Eve and the apple. I was washing my hands after my visitation, when a voice came from another stall. It was A. I was too nervous by the fact of the broken silence to dare even to hear what she said.  Did I answer her? Did I abide by authority and remain silent? Was it my job to remind her of the mysterious edict that applied within and without the stalls? I was a rigid, unrebellious little girl and I responded with something along the lines of "Shhh, we'll get into trouble", which was precisely the moment that Mother Ursula bounded in like James Bond catching a cold war spy. She had not heard A, nor what I said, but only, that I said it. There was no ambiguity or mitigation in those days. And as I tried to avoid the flat of her hand directed at my rump, I samba'd out of the room to the surprise of a janitor, choking tears. A, safely and smartly still ensconced in her stall was spared as Mother followed me to the classroom. My mother was to be informed. My mother would not be amused by my rule-breaking and I had no chance for explanation in the face of Mother Ursula's condemnation. But my terrified tears flowed sufficiently and loudly behind the textbook in front of my face, that Mother Ursula relented.on the threat of notification. 

V knew A a bit past that time, their families friends as well, but not much. V told me that, like myself, A had not married, so I thought to google her when I got home. And there she was, her picture, the woman she had become, looking at me, the present catching up to the long past' footsteps. That erstwhile six year old is an artist, a well known one in Michigan, sculpting and teaching others to sculpt.  

I e-mailed her, and she e-mailed me back and I have e-mailed her back. I don't know if this is a beginning or that we have anything, other than that one intersection at a girls' school in the Bronx in common, but I felt a sacred sense in having had more of her revealed to me because of V. On the other hand, that intersection of our lives, that connection, somehow seems unbreakable, irrevocable, and ordained, and requires my reverence.