Home » 2016 (Page 11)
Michael Phelps Introduces a New Rio Meme
While waiting for his next event, U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps assumed the Great Stone face of Death, concentrating hard on his next medal(s). You may recall the 2012 London Olympics, when the award for best Oly-Meme went to gymnast McKayla Maroney, though hers was the “Not Impressed” face while the Phelpser went all-round death glare.
McKayla Maroney Is Not Impressed
Cielito Lindo, Specializing in Beef Taquitos on Olvera Street
As I was visiting the Taste of Ecuador Festival by Olvera Street yesterday, I decided to find the place that Eve Babitz writes about in her book Eve’s Hollywood about what could have kept rock star Janis Joplin from OD’ing. Toward the end of the book is an essay entitled “The Landmark,” which she dedicated to food writer M. F. K. Fisher. She starts at the very beginning of Los Angeles:
In 1781 a Franciscan with 24 ex-cons and runaway slaves decided to name something that didn’t exist La Ciudad de Nuestra Signora [SIC] La Reina de Los Angeles and proceeded to build a church and a street called Olvera Street. The church and the street are still there, preserved by this huge city called L.A. as a landmark from when one street was named the City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels. The street is uneven and bricky and lined with terrific shops where you can get things you think you want, cheap. And taquito stands for in case you get hungry. Taquitos are much better than heroin, it’s just that no one knows about them and heroin’s so celebrated.
Now Eve’s book was written over forty years ago. I decided to see if I could find her favorite taquito stand, which she describes as follows: “The best place to get them [taquitos], though they are also sold in other places throughout the mall, is the place on the Northeast part of Olvera Street.”
Making Taquitos at Cielito Lindo
It just so happens that the Northeasternmost restaurant on Olvera Street is Cielito Lindo (“My Little Beautiful Heaven”), which has been around since 1934 and specializes in taquitos in a way that none of the other restaurants on the Street do. Once again, Eve continues:
They have black frying pans with long handles that are about a foot and a half in diameter and have sides that flare out about 3 inches high so that oil won’t hit the cook. With metal prongs, the guy lays the raw taquitos neatly in the oil over a fire of coal that produces a heat of such intensity that blast-furnace clouds encompass the buyer as he watches the taquitos cook and the guy turns them over when they are done on one side.
Except for the coal fire, which is now probably against some city health or safety regulation, that’s pretty much what I saw at Cielito Lindo, such that I am 100% sure that this is the place to which Eve would have directed Janis Joplin to keep her from that nasty heroin.
By the way, the taquitos were delicious. I will return there for more. Their chile rellenos are pretty good, too.
Flag at 18th Annual Taste of Ecuador Food Festival
I noticed that there was going to be an 18th Annual Taste of Ecuador Food Festival downtown today, so after I walked uphill on the treadmill for an hour at the gym, I grabbed the Santa Monica #10 Freeway Flyer Bus to Union Station. I had attended one of these events two or three years ago, so I knew pretty much what was going to be there.
According to the organizers, there are some 5,000 Ecuadorians in Los Angeles.
I ate a sanguche de chango (pork sandwich on a bolillo roll) that tasted pretty good, and washed it down with a licuada de sandía (watermelon drink).
Below is a typical menu from one of the stands:
Ecuadorian Menu at Food Stall
Notice the reference to Inka Cola at the bottom of the menu. It is the most popular soda pop of Peru and Ecuador, though it tastes sort of like Mountain Dew on steroids.
On sale at a couple stands were Ecuadorian soccer football jerseys with the national colors.
It wasn’t much, but it’s a reminder that Dan and I are heading down to El Mitad del Mundo in a couple of months.
The House of Commons in Session
Let us say that you were a member of Britain’s House of Commons and wanted to quit your job. If it were anyplace other than the United Kingdom, it would probably be a no-brainer. But in Britain, you have to apply to quit, whereupon you are assigned to a royal stewardship from which you can ease out of office. The two stewardships available for this purpose are:
The Chiltern Hundreds figure in two novels by Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn and The Three Clerks.
In 1624, the House of Commons passed a measure making it illegal for an Member of Parliament to quit or willfully give up his seat. The Act of Settlement of 1701, amended by subsequent legislation, MPs were excepted who accepted an office of profit under the crown. (Originally, MPs were not paid.)
Over the years, there have been several other crown offices which served the same purposes, but only the Chiltern Hundreds and Northstead remain.
F. L. Lucas (1894-1967)
I had forgotten classical scholar F. L. Lucas entirely. In high school, I had read his most famous book, Style (1955), and loved it. Today, I was searching the stacks of the Los Angeles Central Library and ran into his The Search for Good Sense: Four Eighteenth Century Characters—Johnson, Chesterfield, Boswell, Goldsmith (1958). It was there I read the following:
On all these men there already exist many books—many of them big. One feels embarrassed at adding to the number. Nothing can be a substitute for Boswell’s Johnson; or for those works on an American scale of magnificence, the Boswell Papers and the fifty volume edition of Walpole’s letters. But, given the brevity and busyness of life, many have not time time to read these large works, or a series of full-scale biographies; still less, to re-read them. There is a need for both long and short biographies, as for large-scale and small-scale maps. And it is not only a question of time. One reads such things not only for the amusement of reading, but also to remember. For this, I feel, biographies tend to grow too long. Just because one is told far more than one really needs, one remembers far less. The impression is blurred by multitudinousness; just as one could not, says Aristotle (with a flash of imagination rare in his austere pages) grasp as a unity a creature ten thousand furlongs in length.
I love to rediscover authors whose existence I had forgotten. Unfortunately, it seems that Lucas has also been forgotten by others as well. I had a hell of a time finding a decent photograph of him on the Internet.
Well, I for one plan to search out more of his books, and the L.A. Central Library is the perfect place for it. I love his writing style. After all, he influenced mine when I was a teenager in Cleveland. I can only hope that I’ve lived up to his teachings.
They Look Enticing … But Not Just to Humans
Palm trees are a part of the scenery of Southern California that draws admiring comments from Easterners and Midwesterners. Unfortunately, those stately palms can also be a home for roof rats, and often act as an invasion path to your house or apartment.
According to Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health, the following steps should be taken by homeowners who have palm trees:
There are other precautions mentioned in the 4-page document (for which you will need Adobe Acrobat ro read).
One thing that many people do not realize is that the dense foliage of such beautifully landscaped houses such as those in Beverly Hills are effective at attracting rats. According to the New York Times:
“Beverly Hills is a nice place to be a rat,” Ray Honda explained, admiring the cool, verdant landscape of the moneyed class, with its fruit trees, bird feeders, swimming pools and dog-food bowls. “It’s a very good address.”
Mr. Honda, a Los Angeles County health inspector whose speech and demeanor bring Peter Lorre to mind, was quick to append, “the four-legged kind,” adding: “More rats than people, probably. And when they get really bad you can smell them.”
Across Beverly Hills and the other lush corridors of Los Angeles, rats —yellow-bellied, pink-tailed, flea-bitten rats —are wriggling through the woodwork and rooftops. They have come down from the trees and in from the fields, forced into neighborhoods by a strangling drought that has gripped the region. They are eating from dog bowls and drinking from swimming pools and acting in surly ways not normal to the genus.
The article does not mention two-legged rats, but Beverly Hills has always had a large population of those as well.
As much as I like Southern California, I have to admit that we have some unique problems of our own.
Slobodan Milošević
He was the 3rd President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1997-2000), 1st President of Serbia (1991-1997), and the 14th President of the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Serbia (1989-1991). I am referring to Slobodan Milošević, the leader who took his country down a rat hole, was responsible for thousands of deaths by genocide (which he called “ethnic cleansing”), and died while awaiting trial at the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague.
Although he initially ruled a nation of Serbs, Croatians, Slovenians, Albanians, Macedonians, Muslim Bosnians, and Hungarians, in the end he was only interested in changing diverse Yugoslavia into a Greater Serbia. Most of his crimes involved his preferential treatment of his fellow Serbs, mostly in the Yugoslavian Republics of Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, where forces under him or allied to him committed devastating massacres of men, women, and children, including large scale rape and torture.
I am currently reading Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation by Laura Silber and Allan Little (New York: Penguin, 1997). Although twenty years have passed since the first edition came out in 1996, the book still reads like today’s headlines.
It shows what can happen when the elected leader of a democracy decides to take sides on behalf of a particular population and, at the same time, act prejudicially against others. (That’s one of the reasons I am so against a political party being responsive only to, say, angry white males.)
The United States is a diverse country very like the old Yugoslavia. It wouldn’t take much effort to break the country into warring fragments. That’s what happened in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot decided to persecute or kill city dwellers. Also Hitler’s Germany with its antisemitism and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s persecution of Christians and Baha’i. And, needless to say, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh’s attacks on Christians, Yezidis, and non-Sunni Muslims of the approved flavor.
Subject A
It is difficult for me not to write about certain subjects, especially when I am so upset about them. But then, I have to think about you, my readers. However strong I feel about certain things, what if I really don’t have anything to add about what has already been said?
Anyhow, on to the list, in no particular ordure [SIC]:
There are probably a handful of other subjects which aren’t worth ranting about, mostly because of the seemingly irresolvable split between the Union and the Confederacy. Occasionally, I will still blab out a post when I know I should keep my mouth shut. Please forgive me in advance!
Two Little Girls in Kimonos Dancing to Honor Their Ancestors
This last weekend, as in most years, Martine and I attended the Obon Festival at the West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple. It is a joyous affair, especially when one considers all the dancing is to honor one’s ancestors who have passed on to the other side. According to Japan-Guide.Com:
Obon is an annual Buddhist event for commemorating one’s ancestors. It is believed that each year during obon, the ancestors’ spirits return to this world in order to visit their relatives.
Traditionally, lanterns are hung in front of houses to guide the ancestors’ spirits, obon dances (bon odori) are performed, graves are visited and food offerings are made at house altars and temples.
In West L.A., aside from services in the temple, which we didn’t attend, most of the festivities revolve around good eating and the traditional bon odori dances. Present were Japanese from over a dozen nearby Buddhist temples from as far away as Oakland and Visalia. Many Japanese go from one temple to the other during the multi-week Obon celebrations. As separated old friends from different areas greet one another, it adds to the gaiety of the dancing.
As I have written before, my favorite food item is the pork udon noodle soup on which I sprinkle some Shichimi Togarashi, a Japanese red chili powder with black sesame seeds and various herbs and spices.
Goes Great with Udon Soup!
In all, I had two bowls of the stuff, which made me feel downright good about my ancestors and happy to be there at the Obon festival. I hope to continue going until such time as I join my own ancestors.
Raizo Ichikawa in His Role of Kyoshiro Nemuri
The most famous Japanese actors appearing in samurai pictures are Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai. There is also a third name, far less familiar to American audiences: I am thinking of the late Raizo Ichikawa (1931-1969), star of jidai-geki productions from the Daiei Studio.
My favorite character he played was that of Kyoshiro Nemuri, a.k.a. “The Sleepy Eyes of Death,” a Japanese born of a Christian father during a black mass, He is also referred to as a Son of the Black Mass. In his films, he regards the Christians baptized by the Portuguese as hypocrites.
His signature sword move was the Half-Moon Cut, against which his opponents were all but powerless. Note the strange cross symbol on his costume.
Raizo as Kyoshiro Nemuri
Now that I am semi-retired, I would like to pick up as many of the Kyosiro Nemuri films as I can find. It wouldn’t be too difficult, but I would definitely need English subtitles.
During the 1960s and 1970s when I went downtown with friends to the Sho Tokyo and Kokusai theaters (which played nothing but Daiei films) on an almost weekly basis, I always considered myself lucky to see Ichikawa in any role, but especially as Kyoshiro Nemuri. The directors of the series included such names as Kazuo Ikehiro (the best), Kenji Misumi, and Issei Mori.
Unfortunately, Daiei and most of the other Japanese studios disappeared during the obscene run-up in real estate values from 1986 to 1991. More’s the pity. During the 1960s, I believe that the best films that were being made anywhere were the Japanese samurai pictures. And Raizo Ichikawa was, to my mind, the best of the actors.
Tarnmoor 
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