The ghosts in these streets

For some reason I find myself thinking about Charlie Chaplin a lot these days. We watched City Lights the other night and I loved its humour, Chaplin's romantic score, and its simple means of creating poignancy. But most of all I loved its backdrop of old LA.

That's one of the treats of living here. The East has a different history - the emergence from Europe, a political history. But here it's the thrill of knowing every so often that you're standing where Chaplin positioned his camera in 1931, walking past the steps that Laurel and Hardy tried to take the piano up in 1932, meeting a guy who lived in the apartment around the corner on North Kingsley where Walter Neff (Fred McMurray) supposedly lived in Double Indemnity.

It's not always an immediate awareness of the ghosts. I passed this building on Wilshire Boulevard a number of times before learning that street level is where the millionaire is supposed to live in City Lights.

Sidewalk Scene

As I was walking along one of LA's narrow sidewalks the other day I could hear the conversation of the two guys ambling ahead of me.

"He shot me in the stomach and I flew back 20 feet. So I turned around. I aimed at both his shoulders. I tried to blow out his pelvis and I aimed at his pecker. This is lying down, you know."

Aware that I was fast coming up behind them they stood aside to let me pass, and I heard the bigger guy go on: "I got both his shoulders. I got an inch above his pelvis and half an inch above his pecker."

By then I'd steamed out of earshot.

But what got me, I have to say, is once more that strange American conjunction of violence and courtesy. It does my head in.  

Landforms as much as grids

Three cheers for cities that sit lightly on their landscape. Such a one, I am always surprised to be reminded of, is Los Angeles.

Just a few blocks north of us is Griffith Park, the "largest urban park in the United States". Unlike Central Park in New York it is not man-made. There are signs warning hikers against Mountain Lions and Rattlesnakes. The topography and the Live Oaks survive.

Developing an inner map of Los Angeles means memorising landforms as much as grids. Whereas in Sydney I learnt to map the bays and coves, here I am now seeing that Griffith Park is part of the hill chain that leads west to the Hollywood sign; part of the 'little hills' that the Native Americans called cahuenga, sitting between the coastal plain and the larger Verdugo Mountains which are backed by the peaks of the San Gabriels surrounding the San Fernando Valley. Memorising landforms also means developing an indigenous, pre-European view of the area.

Here in this photograph you can see the eastern end of Griffith Park. Go round this corner and you head toward Toluca Lake or northward to Burbank before embarking on the great east-west 'boulevards' that head sea-ward toward Ventura County. Pan right of this view and you might see snow on Mt Whitney. Four and a half miles from Downtown, there are freeways and traffic galore, housing, shopping strips...

...but also the original lie of the land. It's a pity the river was cemented, but in places it's going to be restored.

"The wolf by the ear"

A CNN poll two days ago found that a majority of Americans thought this year's congress was the worst congress ever. Maybe they're right. But there were a few readers' comments along the lines of "what do you expect?" quoting Jeffersonian adages like "government is best which governs least".

I'm always a bit concerned when people quote Jefferson on limiting government. Even if Jefferson didn't exactly say this, several of the US Founding Fathers had similar views and it may be good to remember that Madison, Franklin and Jefferson were influenced by the example of the relatively small Iroquois, Delaware or Cherokee Nations who seemed to survive well with few formal rules but whose members had a concern for the welfare of the tribe. The Indian Nations might not have needed so much government because their individual members had a high degree of altruism.

I don't deny that American liberty has enabled spectacular (and often beneficial) achievement by untrammelled individuals. And the 'don't tread on me'/'how high is up?' attitudes are part of the reason I'm here. But mightn't it be possible that Jefferson was a despot down there on his plantation at Monticello; that his slaves chafed under his government? A person needs to be careful spouting Jefferson's views on government. Support for government has a lot to do with whom it serves.

And this congress may not have served many but in a country of 300 million people all with competing desires and needs, should you try to go without it or expect it to do better?

Ups and downs

There is so much I enjoy about Los Angeles. I love that the whole city is a writers' workshop. You look over the shoulders of so many people working on wifi in Starbucks and see screenplay format on their computer screens. You hear neighbours talk of a coyote in their driveway the other night. You can walk into a roomful of Giacomettis at the County Museum of Art or see the huge ceramic that a couple commissioned from Matisse for the patio of their home...

But there is a downside. Tonight, on the 181 there was a guy yelling, 'You'll do HARD TIIIIME!!!!" and sneezing pathologically. Yesterday it was a woman cooing to two baby dolls in a basinette. When she looked up she had doll makeup on her face - heart-shaped lips and rouged cheeks. We see disturbed people every time we get on a train or bus. And then there's this (see attached). Just an ad...

There's an Australian type called "a battler" but I think some people battle even harder in America's more energetic, but more "sink or swim", society.

Coffee ii

I posted a blog some time ago (13 September) listing a number of places where I'd found good coffee in the States. Australians are big snobs, or shall we say more particular, about this, and it's multi million dollar business in the Australian cities. For some reason there seems to be good coffee in this area (the broad circle that takes in East, West and the main part of Hollywood.)

In the interests of occasionally having a trivial post, I continue with my list:

Javavista, 6707 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood CA 90027;
Groundworks on the corner of Cahuenga and Sunset in Hollywood;
the Gelato Bar, 1936 Hillhurst Ave, 90027.

And I forgot the place we used to go to in Greenpoint in New York - Milk and Roses. I often used to work there back in 2011.

 A more substantial blog next time...

 

Two sides

I was put on the spot recently: "Tell me a story that tells me what Australia is like." I was stuck for words. Since then, I've thought of two stories which could provide pretty good contrasting impressions.

The first, humourous. There is some audio on YouTube called "'the Rheem Hot Water Man". It's a bloke  thinking he's calling the Rheem Hot Water Service After Hours Emergency Number. "Me bloody hot water system's pissing water everywhere." The trouble is - no-one's there. I tell Americans that Australians love to swear. I myself often upbraid inanimate objects, in such an adjectival manner. You don't hear much 'cussing' here, that's for sure. But these 'recorded messages' illustrate this Australian characteristic - in full flourish as the man keeps leaving irate message after irate message.

The other story concerns the Japanese midget-submarine attack on Sydney Harbour in World War II.

One of the midget-submarines being salvaged the morning after

On the night of 31 May-1 June 1942 three midget-submarines made their way into Sydney Harbour. Two of the submarines were detected before they could attack and the crews scuttled their boats and committed suicide. The third fired on the US battleship, Chicago but hit an Australian depot boat the Kuttabul, instead, killing 21 sailors onboard. Now these attacks put the wind up Australians. They certainly showed Australians how vulnerable Australia was to attack. But the Australian government located the bodies of the four submariners whose crafts had sunk in the Harbour (the third was only found outside the Heads in 2006), and here's the thing: accorded them full naval honours, cremated them and found a circuitous way, I think via the Red Cross, to return the ashes to Japan. I read once that the Japanese government felt that this reflected great credit on the Australians. I certainly do.

The remains of the dead submariners arriving in Yokohama, October 1942

As postscript, the Australian government hoped that the respect they'd shown the Japanese dead might lead to an improvement in the way Australian prisoners-of-war were treated. It didn't, and when the Japanese used the funerals for propaganda purposes, the Australian High Command forbade the conduct of similar ceremonies in the future. But I like to think that the initial Australian instinct was one of respect, even for an enemy.

Now to bring our attitude to 'boat people' back in line with traditional Australian instincts...