Stumbling across history

We had lunch at Olamendi's down at Dana Point on the coast the other day.

We were only after some Mexican food for lunch, but found ourselves sitting at this table.

We asked the story. This was Richard and Pat Nixon's favourite Mexican restaurant - the Nixons had retired to San Clemente, five miles to the south - and we were sitting at their table.

It's nice to have little brushes with history you didn't expect.

Under God

When I saw stars along Hollywood Boulevard dedicated to people like Joseph Szigeti, I realised that classical music was once American popular culture.

There are stars also to people like Stravinsky, Pierre Monteux, Paderewski, and the great Wagnerians Lauritz Melchior and Lotte Lehmann.

I love LA. I love the look of LA streets. The distant hills stop them from looking totally like Parramatta Road, or any anonymous-ville else.

I love the fact that you can see coyotes up in the hills and that they warn you about rattlesnakes on the trails.

I love that it often looks like 'that great Alice Springs on the other side of the sphere' (to paraphrase Herman Melville's comment about Australia)

Most of all I love that movies are made here.

This mural on the eastern wall of Hollywood High, Kate's father's old school, portrays some of the famous alumni - Lawrence Fishburne, Judy Garland, Carol Burnett...Check the way the guy on the side is pulling aside the curtain. A reference to the famous American painting of a fellow in his athenaeum (whose title I forget), I imagine it means this 'Old School Tie' is a producer, unlike the eastern wall's front-of-camera performers.

Not everyone likes Hollywood though. I saw this on the way down to San Diego earlier in the year.

A big red slash through the Hollywood sign.

And that's got me thinking about America's religiosity. Presidents these days end their speeches with 'God bless you. God bless the United States of America.' It wasn't also so. And wasn't until recently. Even a president as devout as Jimmy Carter ended his farewell address with 'Thank you, fellow citizens, and farewell'. Richard Nixon launched into a bigger arabesque, 'We come from many faiths, we pray perhaps to different gods - but really the same God in a sense - but I want to say for each and every one of you, not only will we always remember you, not only will we always be grateful to you but always you will be in our hearts and you will be in our prayers.' But then ended, merely: 'Thank you very much.' I wonder if any modern president would dare leave out the 'God bless you' mantra.

An Australian prime minister would not dare put it in! Australians give short shrift to public figures wearing religion on their sleeve. Wave the Bible and you are less likely to be elected. And there are advantages to this lower key. Has intense religiosity ever spared America immoral behaviour? Has it prevented shonky behaviour on Wall Street in recent years? Has it weeded out corporate sociopathy?

But here's an upside. Regardless of the work they're doing, Americans act joyfully. An Australian behind the counter will often give you resentful service; grunt when you say thank you rather than say, 'You're welcome'. You don't find that much here. Americans may simply be making lattes day in and day out, ringing up a cash register, driving a bus along the same route, but they behave as if they're part of the performance, the Divine Comedy. My current theory? I think they feel reassured they're doing what God wants them to do. It may not be forging a treaty or building a dam (always), but they feel that they fit into the grand design.

There's enough of the larrikin in me to be amused by the heckler who calls out 'bullshit' at the end of a ringing religious phrase, but it would be nice if Australians had a bit more of a sense of working for a higher power (or ideal). There are advantages to a higher key. I think this is partly how America built Wall Street, Silicon Valley - and Hollywood.

From sea to shining sea

I was interested to read on the plaque below these bells at San Juan Capistrano that they were rung by the president of the United States, 'Mr Richard M. Nixon' and his wife, "Mrs Richard M. Nixon' in 1969. What struck me was the use of the 'mr' and 'mrs' prefixes. They are certainly less grandiose than what I was expecting, and I wonder if that has something to do with the times in which this plaque was struck. Apart from the glaring contradiction of Vietnam, were those times at least in some sense less imperial?
I enjoy being in this most southwestern corner of America. There is a prevalence of Spanish, as we seem to be wearing through to the deep-set footmarks of Portola, Fr Serra and others. As we booked accommodation in New York next month and were talking about things going on in faraway rocky Maine, I wondered how imperial and united this country really is these days. I remember thinking, when I watched some mayors debating on TV a couple of weeks ago (from memory there were the mayors of Atlanta, Washington, Cleveland, New York...), that each city may find its own solutions to the country's infrastructure shortfalls, and that maybe the country will devolve into city states. I am aware that in places Lakota may be as prevalent as Spanish, or Chinese or Vietnamese (though are there still Acaghchemem speakers - pronounced A-harcha-mum - around here?). There is far more variety and mass packed into this continental space (a factor certainly in squeezing up excellence.)
Outside the walls of the former mission was a plaque explaining that the mission was returned to the Catholic Church from the Forster family by proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln on 18 March 1865. Another thing struck me about this. Lincoln never made it this far west. But in the dying days of the Civil War, back east so, so far from here, such was the extent of his continental reach.

Two footnotes:
1. I found on Wiki-pedia that the Acagchemem language was recorded by Anastacia Majel and John P. Harrington in 1933 and that the tapes resurfaced in 1995. The language is being re-learnt by a number of members of the tribe whose number of enrolments now stands at 2,800.
2. During his presidency, Nixon maintained a 'White House' not far from here, at San Clemente. It's out on a headland which was pointed out to me the other day.

Environmental sounds

Woke up this morning to the sound of a halyard hitting the flagpost outside the Post Office across the road. It reminded me of the clinking of boats in Rozelle Bay. But the most distinctive sounds at night are the Amtrak horns, blaring their chord over every level crossing possibly a mile or two away on the track that lines the bay from Emeryville to Jack London Square. This reminds me of the line in Richard Nixon's acceptance speech at the Miami Nominating Convention in 1968 about the boy who heard the distant train whistles in the night and dreamed of faraway places.
But it's not always night sounds. As we crossed Powell Street in the city yesterday I heard the sound of invisible iron chains scraping along the cement beneath the tracks and realised there is a sound that goes with trolley cars. I hear birds of course by day but would not have a clue about their accompanying plumage. And that's the way I'd want it. I saw some birds take off today and the trilling of their wings reminded me of Top-knot Pigeons. The smell of wattle or Sweet Pittosporum I can handle but Australian birds here would really make me think the world had been turned upside down.
By the way, do you know that 'The World Turned Upside Down' was the tune played by Cornwallis's fife band when his army surrendered to Washington at Yorktown?