Roxie

In the canon of American literature of the last century, Nathanael West figures in a couple of times. Miss Lonelyhearts is considered his signature work–a novel of isolation and animal longing.

My favorite has always been The Day of the Locust, which ends with Hollywood burning to the ground amidst a savage mob running amok and devouring all that would try and halt it. It was made into an almost-good movie starring Donald Sutherland, William Atherton and Karen Black. The Day of the Locust has it all: artists, wannabe starlets, midgets, cockfights, cowboys, darkness, hunger and desperation.

It’s a great novel and a not great film with a couple of huge saving graces that compel one to see it anyway. A genuinely great performance by Donald Sutherland as Homer Simpson (yes, that’s the character’s name–no shit) and everyday schmoe businessman who is pining away for Karen Black’s Faye Greener, who finds him about as exciting as a vanilla milkshake.

Also interested in her affections is a not-very-talented painter named Tod Hackett who has an inflated opinion of himself. She is a little more interested in him, but mostly she’s self-absorbed, as are most of the characters in this sad and devastating story.

The novel introduces several hangers-on and down-at-the-heels characters–the cowboy who plays cowboy types in movies, a vulgar midget, a Mexican cockfighter–the seedy milieu completes a picture of the human afterthoughts of the American movie business.

Its finale is something right out of fire and brimstone biblical reckoning: Homer Simpson, defeated in love and languishing in a state of suicidal despair, is hectored and hit in the head with a stone by Adore Loomis, a child-actor and little shit of the first order. The child makes a fool of him and then injures him and he decides this is the last indignity he will suffer and stomps the kid to death in full view of the crowd at a movie premiere. The crowd then devours Homer who has gone quite mad and starts imitating the sounds of the siren as he is pulled apart.

Tod Hackett is witness to all of it and as the city starts to burn, he marvels at the similarity to a painting he has completed called “The Burning of Los Angeles.”  He is injured in the melee yet oddly, maddeningly, he seems satisfied.

It is a grim and despairing coda, reflecting what West thought of Hollywood–perversion, vanity, greed and glitter–a fraudulent place full of evil and venality. It is the garish flipside of the American dream.

It unfolds, rightly , in front of “Kahn’s Persian Palace,” an obvious stand it for Graumann’s Chinese Theater.

The movie also boasts the stellar cinematography of Conrad Hall–one of the greats–and also one of the reasons to see the movie. A lot of great work went into this flawed film. John Schlesinger could have used a little more restraint in his direction.  The film, at times, becomes the kind of lachrymose melodrama that the novel openly pillories

Karen Black chews up the scenery, as she is wont to do, and William Atherton is perfectly unctuous as an artist who has an immense opinion of a rather ordinary talent. The human comedy and tragedy is on full view in this marvelous novel and just-okay movie.

Whenever I think of it, I think of the doomed child stars, never to become fully formed people, wandering the world of adults as blind as kittens. It’s never hard for me to make the case that the reason Michael Jackson needed his own giraffe had a lot to do with what show business taught him to want. He seemed a fetishized object of perpetual childhood his whole life…a plaything for a culture just as ready to dispose of him.

Black Blood Corridos

Midnight City#3 : Esmeralda’s Hollywood

Here is a taste of my show that will open at Pierogi on Friday night. It comes from a song by my pal ,Steve Earle, in which the ghost of a want-to-be starlet wanders Hollywood Boulevard at twilight with all of the other ghosts, walking the stars and, even in the afterlife, waits for the phone to ring.

Every kind of ghost is accounted for and the evil struggles with the good, in Esmeralda’s Hollywood.

Midnight City 2: The Infernal Nod Machine of Hollywood Boulevard

There is a not-very-good movie from the nineties that bears one lovely, elegiac passage about Hollywood Boulevard. It is an otherwise forgettable piece of grade-D chewing gum for the brain called “Jimmy Hollywood.” Luckily the moments of grace are the opening credits in which a blond-wigged Joe Pesci (never has a hair piece been a worse idea) walks the stars on Hollywood Boulevard with his eyes closed. As he stops at each one he says the name of the honored actor or actress under his feet—he knows them by heart—and by this time, without a word of exposition, we know him. He is an actor who never made it and never will and yet, in our hearts, in a weird way we begin to hold out hope for him. It doesn’t hurt that the music in the opening sequence is Robbie Robertson’s lovely “Soap-Box Preacher.” It’s appropriate this song is used: Pesci’s character, Jimmy Alto, is attending his church—Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—and he is practicing his act of faith, his stations of the cross—walking the stars and honoring those entombed in the cement forever. It is heartbreaking and hopeful in the same moment and, for any other film, would have and could have been a departure point for a wonderful story. Not this one though. Like Jimmy Hollywood, it never gets out of the gate.

When I first saw this film I thought it was an innocuous enough flight of whimsy and didn’t realize that, in Los Angeles, guys like Jimmy Hollywood actually exist. On my last visit there, I arranged a show of twenty-nine Chicago artists at East Hollywood’s La Luz de Jesus Gallery.

There is no overarching theme or anything like that. I did this the way the old purveyors of R&B music used to in the South. I put together a “showcase,” which is what the labels that recorded what was then considered “race” music did in the fifties and early sixties when a great many R&B and blues artists could not get played on white radio. Out of this came the muscular Stax, Chess and Motown labels—there are worse models to steal from. I thought that these artists, exposed to a different scene and different city’s tastes, might find or broaden their audiences. Chicago can be indifferent and condescending to its own talent, if not downright hostile at times. It was also fun to see what Midwesterners we were, as a group, staring at everything like rubes and enjoying the hell out of it. Here’s the good news: the show is selling really well and a whole bunch of worthy talent got to see a different place and maybe realize more possibility.

As I was leaving my hotel for the opening, I saw a TMZ minibus picking up people to go on a tour of homes of the stars. I chatted briefly with a couple getting on the bus. They were ecstatic at the prospect of seeing where movie and TV stars lived. The woman was damn near having multiples at the thought of seeing Luke Perry and Gary Busey’s houses. I wanted to tell her she should pray the fuck that Busey isn’t home—I’ve met the guy and nuts is too small a word—it honestly just doesn’t cover it. He’s very likable, but I suspect he’s one of those who will wind up with a tinfoil hat if he doesn’t already wear one.

A really gifted young photographer named Daniel Medel drove me around out there and, as we entered Beverly Hills, there were the kids selling star maps at intersections. It began to dawn on me the purchase electronic media has on this place—it is a one-industry town that appraises one in the most cosmetic of ways, and grinds its castoffs into dust. I thought Chicago was tough, but the casual brutality of Hollywood makes us look like Avon Ladies. East Hollywood is a lesson in the back alley of the American dream. It is the repository for the actresses who don’t make it, the big-haired boys who can’t afford a play-for-pay gig at the Whisky, the jogging-suited Armenian mob guys blasting around in Escalades with Jay-Z pounding out the tinted windows. And then there are the faithful—those wandering around Grauman’s looking up at everything—still a little high on the stardust that is Hollywood, and its grimy business of dreams.

They’re wondering, “How? How do I get noticed?” The hunger for this thing wafts off them like a wave of humidity on a hot day. In a strange way you want to pull for them because they are us; we all feel this way about something.

You also in your rational mind know that these poor bastards are truly fucked, that the black-and-white movies that pulled them into sleep are as toxic as ether. We don’t live in that world anymore. We never did.

The story about Lana Turner getting “discovered” at Schwab’s Drugstore is bullshit. The real tale is much less savory, but we want to believe the legend, to hold fast to our myths and million-to-one shots. The Lana Turner myth ought to include her real-life coda: When the past-her-prime starlet was being knocked around by a mob shit-bird named Johnny Stompanato the beatings were so awful that they emboldened Turner’s fourteen-year-old daughter to righteously shank Johnny Stomp with a butcher’s knife. When the cops got there Stompanato was as dead as a fucking hammer. Lana Turner’s career was never the same, though I loved her in one of her unglamorous late films, “Madame X,” in which some of the sordid plot points echoed Turner’s own life. She passed away in 1995, mostly alone, leaving the bulk of her wealth to her housekeeper and caretaker.

I prefer to think of her final resting place as 6241 Hollywood Boulevard, under a brass star. So, when you walk by? gently blow her a kiss.

Los Feliz

Los Feliz is the part of L.A. that La Luz de Jesus is located in–an enchanting, haunted, and mixed neighborhood snuggled between Silverlake and Hollywood. It is home to Griffith Park and its famous observatory which, in my mind’s eye, is the place where we all look for the stars.

Hollywood Boulevard, where La Luz is located, is a mix of hipsters, actors, artists, and the walking wounded. It is also home to one of the greatest burger joints in the world–Umami Burger, one of the best I’ve ever had. For me, this neighborhood is best typified by my pal, Billy Shire, who founded La Luz de Jesus and its companion shop, Wacko, a reliquary of oddities and wonderful contradictions.

Los Feliz is one of the historic enclaves that makes L.A. fascinating and an endless repository for our dreams.

Sky at Ohio: The Night Compass

The Sky at Ohio #15 (Strange Angels)

In the Midwest, where the land gets flat and becomes prairie, at night the darkness and landscape begin to look like the same plane. Something magical happens when this occurs–moths, lightning bugs, stars and the trails of airplanes become a mysterious light show; a trick of the darkness and low ambient light. The night looks,sometimes, like one of those Lite-Brite sets from childhood. The further one gets from the city and the street lights–the more magical this looks.

I’m always hypnotized by the dance of moths and bugs around lights or fires. . .what I came to think of, as a kid, as “strange angels.”

People who live on the coasts will often derisively refer to the midwest as a “flyover,” robbing themselves of a chance to experience the mysteries of the landscape here, and the magic therein. It’s a shame.

In Indiana and Ohio there is a creature called the Crecopia moth that is born without a mouth. In its entire life, (a mere matter of hours) it never eats. It lives just long enough to breed and then it dies. But while it is alive, it is one of the more beautiful things on this earth. And I guess being alive long enough to bust a nut is better than not breeding at all.

I think moths are beautiful. they are also as destructive as hell. They eat paper and cloth and sometimes other moths. Yet they come in these other-worldly dresses and sometimes echo other natural forms. Atlas Moths are huge and beautiful and look like they were made from Arican or Indian cloth. Luna Moths are a shimmering pale green, like celestial candy. Hawk moths are an ominous and lethally lovely pattern of splotches and autumnal colors–greys, umbers, yellows and rusts that are intoxicating.

I tend to return to moths from time to time as a subject, particularly when describing a place. They are so much part of my childhood–the big, beautiful buckeye moths that used to scare me as a kid. . .the tiny white, powdery ghost moths that seemed so ephemeral and fleeting. In the autumn, I’d find them dead on the widow sill from the season’s first freeze and I would be reminded that every still thing is the mirror of another, and also of the Unamuno quote that states, “We die of cold and not of darkness.”

I used to think they were  attracted to the light, when in fact it was heat they were seeking in order to stay alive, like us; just trying to stay in the world while  dancing their tenuous dance with mortality in the light.

The City Owl

Thank you – David Hernandez

My friend, David Hernandez,died this week. He was one of my oldest friends and he emboldened me to write poetry seriously. When I first started, he gave me a smile and held out a hand. He was about 5 foot 6 and he was a giant.

Godspeed Poetry Man.  You were a balm and a healing voice in this city, and I was privileged to know you.

See/watch David Hernandez read some of his poetry.

Ohio – Toledo Dancing with an Autumn Star

A woman dancing with Toledo; the sky at Ohio…

Dandelions in the Sky – Ohio

She is a necklace of Dandelions in the Sky. . .

Look at Miss Ohio

There is a song by Gillian Welch called Look at Miss Ohio, and it is full of the heartbreak and yearning of the Midwest, as well as the Ohio of the Civil War. Every time I drive through this state and look up at the stars, I think of this song and how perfectly grounded and suited it is to this most American of states; how the longing in one woman’s heart can, at that moment, seem like one we all share. It is a brilliant bit of songwriting that makes kin of us all.

This piece is about that lovely song.

Ohio Owl

Among the cultures of the American Indian tribes there are a myriad of beliefs about the owl. An owl on a rock near a lake or a river, signified a particular tribe’s ownership of that place for fishing and trapping. the Iroquois believed this, as well as the owl being a protector from water monsters and devils, which would drown those who wandered too close to the water at night.

The Apache believed that a dream of an owl was a harbinger of the nearness of one’s death. Cherokee medicine men and shaman thought screech owls had the power to bring on illnesses as punishment. The Cree believed the small owls could summon the spirits with their other-worldly whistles and cackles.

A great many tribes thought owls could travel between the worlds of the living and the dead. The Dakota Sioux believed the burrowing owl held sway in the underneath–the world below the ground, and also acted as a protector for brave warriors, whereas, the Hopi believed this same owl to be a god of the dead and a guardian of fire and keeper of all things under ground, even seeds. They called the bird Ko’ko which means “watcher of the dark.”

The Nez Pierce believed that owls were both the deceased person and their newly released soul, and the Mojave peoples believed that after death, one would become an owl as an interim stage, before becoming a water beetle and then, ultimately, pure air.  The Navajo were sure that listening to the owl, a man could hear his future.

I’ve loved owls since I was kid. In high school, I had a screech owl I’d found for a few years before bringing it to Willowbrook wildlife haven and having him repatriated to the wild.

I worked part time at a pet store, which helped me feed Oliver the mice he ate every day. e had a big wooden box as a cage with a few perches in it, and from time to time, I’d let him fly freely around the basement.  There were NO mice in our basement.

The sense most acute in owls is their HEARING. Everyone thinks it’s eyesight. Not really. Owls hunt by stealth. Their wings are billowed and silent and their sense of hearing is astonishing.

There is an owl that I see in Ukrainian Village once in a while. It’s a short-eared owl, and I wonder what the fuck he is doing here. I’ve only ever seen them around open fields before. I guess, like us, they go where the food is.

I’ve seen a lot of great horned owls in the city. Logan Square, with its bounty of old-growth trees, is lousy with them, and it is a good environment for them–all of the rodents they can eat.

The truth is, once you look for them, you begin to notice them, mostly at dusk and dawn, when they hunt.  Our night watchmen.

Ohio Polecat

There is really no such thing as an American polecat. It is a colorful bit of slang that has been used to describe skunks, weasels, minks, and ferret–anything that smells bad and resembles a weasel or an art dealer. It is also a bit of urban slang used to describe a “pole dancer” in a particularly low-end strip joint.

There is something wholly American about this bit of slang. During the political season, I heard an older resident of Akron, Ohio comment on cable news that, “Every four years these polecats come to Ohio shilling for the Democrats or Republicans and try to scare everyone into voting for their party’s slimy imbecile. What a load of horse shit.”

This piece is for that guy who knew a skunk when he saw one.

Thank You #3