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Hockney’s Pearblossom Highway

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One of my favorite pieces of art is David Hockney’s “Pearblossom Highway, 11-18 April 1986, #2.” It is an almost perfect image of the Antelope Valley along the northern slope of the San Gabriel Mountains. I have driven that road a number of times on my way to Devil’s Punchbowl County Park, and even as far as Victorville—when I didn’t want to face traffic on the I-10 or the Pomona Freeway.

I am not always a fan of Hockney’s work, but this particular photo montage, in its own way, gives a better idea of the terrain than any single photograph would. It was originally created for Vanity Fair out of 800 photographs to support a story about the road trip that Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Humbert Humbert took to Death Valley. For the story of the creation of this image, click on this website by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.The actual site being depicted is the intersection of the Pearblossom Highway with 165th Street. The stop sign is no longer there, as a street light has replaced it. Also, the highway at this point has been widened to four lanes.

The Antelope Valley is still a desolate place, even though some half million people now live there, mostly along California Highway 14 as it wends north to join U.S. 395. The Pearblossom Highway (California 138) connects the Antelope Valley Freeway (California 14) with the I-15 at Victorville.

It’s a long and lonely haul, especially if one is behind a loaded big rig. But then, that is a good description of the L.A. experience.

Shimmering into Non-Existence

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It was early in the morning of February 9, 1971 at precisely 6:00 AM Pacific Standard Time. I was half-asleep when I suddenly heard the howling of several dogs in the Santa Monica neighborhood where I lived. Within seconds, I felt the bed and the whole building shaking, accompanied by a deep noise as if the earth was being fractured (which it was). I held on to the mattress for dear life, but found myself on the floor nonetheless.

That was my experience of the Sylmar Earthquake, also known as the San Fernando Earthquake. Ever since then, I have been scared of quakes. Was it a small quake? Perhaps it was the precursor of a much larger quake. The Northridge Earthquake of January 17, 1994 was like that, following in the wake of several much smaller quakes centered in Santa Monica Bay.

Now when I see pictures of the Gaziantep temblor that shook parts of Turkey and Syria, I feel as if the solidity I feel of my footsteps on the ground is a possible illusion. Without warning, the buildings around me could come crashing down, possibly with me in one of them.

This afternoon, I took a walk along the Venice Boardwalk, stopping in at Small World Books to buy the work of a recommended Swiss author. As I looked at the buildings along the Boardwalk, I almost felt the ground under my feet begin to move. I remember the Tsunami Evacuation Route signs scattered around the streets in the area and felt that terra firma within a matter of seconds could sport waves like the sea; and, if the quake was out at sea, a giant wave could inundate the low-lying blocks along the ocean before I could get to safety.

If you’ve never been in a major quake, you could laugh away the small quakes. But after 1971 and 1994, there is no laughing. I am on high alert. Will it rapidly get worse? Or is this just another little memento mori?

Nothing Has To Be Done

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I have been reading a rare book of humor from the old Soviet Union. It is The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union by Vladimir Voinovich, who, for his pains, was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union in February 1974. Unable to make a living as a writer in Russia, he naturally fled to the West. The following excerpt from the book describes an amusing visit to the KGB (Soviet State Security) in Moscow.

During my last years in Moscow, a beginning writer would visit me from time to time when he was in town from the provinces. He’d complain of not being published and gave me his novels and stories, of which there were a great number, to see what I thought of them. He was certain that his works weren’t being published because their content was too critical. And indeed they did contain criticism of the Soviet system. But they had another major flaw as well: they lacked even the merest glimmer of talent. Sometimes he would request, and sometimes demand, that I send his manuscripts abroad and help get them published over there. I refused. Then he decided to go to the KGB and present them with an ultimatum: either they were immediately to issue orders that his works be published in the USSR or he would leave the USSR at once.

Apparently, it went something like this.

As soon as he had entered the KGB building, someone walked over to him and said: “Oh, hello there. So you’ve finally come to see us.!”

“You mean you know me?” asked the writer.

“Is there anyone who doesn’t?” said the KGB man, spreading his hands. “Have a seat. What brings you here? Do you want to tell us that you don’t like the Soviet system?”

“That’s right, I don’t,” said the writer.

“But what specifically don’t you kike about it?”

The writer replied that, in his opinion, there was no freedom in the Soviet Union, particularly artistic freedom. Human rights were violated, the standard of living was steadily declining—and he voiced other critical remarks as well. Good for about seven years in a camp.

Having listened politely, the KGB man asked: “But why are you telling me all this?”

“I wanted you to know.”

“We know. Everyone knows all that.”

“But if everyone knows, something should be done about it.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. Nothing has to be done about it!”

Surprised by that turn in the conversation, the writer fell silent.

“Have you said everything you wanted to?” asked the KGB man politely.

“Yes, everything.”

“Then why are you still sitting there?”

“I’m waiting for you to arrest me.”

“Aha, I see,” said the KGB man. “Unfortunately, there’s no way we can arrest you today. We’re too busy. If the desire doesn’t pass, come see us again, and we’ll do everything we can to oblige you.” And he showed the writer out.

The writer visited me a few more times before he disappeared. I think he finally may have achieved his goal and gotten someone to give him the full treatment for dissidence.

Jean-Luc

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Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) with Wife Anna Karina

Beginning in the 1960s and extending through the early 1970s, I thought that the most exciting filmmaker in the world was Jean-Luc Godard. While I was a film student at UCLA, it seemed that two or three new titles came out every year. All of them enthralled me.

Then, something happened. When La Chinoise came out, I was sorely disappointed. Always sympathetic to revolutionaries, Godard seemed to have turned Maoist. His stars—Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anna Wiazemski—endlessly quoted from Chairman Mao’s little red book. Godard had gone doctrinaire on me. Even though I myself had flirted with the Progressive Labor Party in 1967, as a Hungarian-American I had uneasy feelings about dogmatic Communism.

La Chinoise: Way Too Dogmatic

Still, I thought that most of Godard’s films of the 1960s were exciting. At the time, all my favorite American directors were either dead or dying, and here was a young French director still in his thirties who could be relied upon to produce more masterpieces in the years to come. Alas! It was not to be. I have seen a few of his later productions, which I found not quite up to the standard Godard had set earlier in his career.

Among my favorites of his were:

  • À bout de souffle or Breathless (1960), one of the iconic films of the French New Wave
  • Vivre sa vie or My Life to Live (1962)
  • Le mépris or Contempt (1963), starring Brigitte Bardot
  • Alphaville (1965), a great combo of noir and science fiction
  • Pierrot le fou (1965)
  • Masculin féminin (1966), starring French pop star Chantal Goya
  • Made in USA (1966)
  • Weekend (1967), an apocalyptic satire of the French bourgeoisie

Many of the above films starred Godard’s wife, the lovely Anna Karina, which for me served as an added inducement to see the films.

Godard continued to make films. Between 1968 and 1972, he made political films with the Dziga Vertov Group, none of which I have seen. As late as 2022, he kept releasing films. The exhilaration of the earlier works, however, was gone. I have yet to see more than a handful of them, but I would like to at some point. Many of them are pretty obscure and hard to find.

Last year, at the age of 91, Godard found himself suffering from a series of incapacitating illnesses, such that he committed assisted suicide on September 13, which is allowed by Swiss law. It is an unfortunate end for a great artist whose work influenced my life in so many ways at a time when I was young and alienated. But then, such is life.

“Fame Is a Fickle Food …”

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The Hollywood Walk of Fame

Here is a poem by Emily Dickinson on the subject of fame. It is short, but packs a punch.

Fame Is a Fickle Food

Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set
Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the
Farmer’s corn
Men eat of it and die

The End of the Beginning

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My Janus-Faced January Reading Program

As I wrote in my post dated January 1 of this year, I like to devote a whole month out of each year reading authors I have never read before. As this is the last day of my Januarius Project for January 2023, I thought I’d report on the authors I have discovered.

I have read eleven books this month. Six of them turned out to be excellent:

  • Thomas Hodgkin. Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire. I. The Visigothic Invasion. The first of eight volumes and 5,000 pages on the Barbarian Invasions. Excellent scholarship and exciting even!
  • Magda Szabo. The Door. A superb Hungarian novel about a writer and her domineering housekeeper.
  • Laszló F. Földényi. Melancholy. Another Hungarian author dealing with the history of melancholy in Western literature and civilization. Not an easy book to read, but worth the effort.
  • Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Writing Across the Landscape. Travel Journals 1960-2010. It’s always fascinating to see other places from a poet’s perspective.
  • Lucretius. The Nature of Things. An ancient Roman poet describes the science of his day—in verse. Reading Lucretius tells me we may have advanced in some respects, but not all.
  • Juan Rulfo. The Plain in Flames. Why have I not heard of this Mexican author before? Like John Webster, he could see the skull beneath the skin; and his short stories are powerful and gemlike.

The remaining five were merely really good:

  • Vilmos Kondor. Budapest Noir. A top-notch mystery set in the Budapest of the 1930s, on the track of a young woman’s murder.
  • Han Kang. The Vegetarian. A young woman goes from vegetarianism to pushing the envelope of what is human. The author is Korean.
  • Don Carpenter. Hard Rain Falling. A noir crime novel about a pool shark whose life goes from bad to worse. The beginning is particularly powerful.
  • Yu Miri. Tokyo Ueno Station. The author is a Japanese woman of Korean ancestry. A powerful look at urban homelessness in Tokyo.
  • Horacio Quiroga. 7 Best Short Stories. One for the kiddies. A Uruguayan author writes stories about the Argentinian jungle that are reminiscent of Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

I can see myself reading other works by Hodgkin, Szabo, Ferlinghetti, and Rulfo in the year to come.

Sunnylands

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Cacti on the Grounds of the Sunnylands Center & Gardens

Attached to the historic Sunnylands Estate in Rancho Mirage are extensive cactus gardens that are open to the general public five days a week. My brother Dan and I wanted to tour the estate, but it was closed for a scheduled event. Instead, we spent a couple hours seeing a film about the role of the center in world politics and walking the gardens.

Although the center has no official status, it has been the site of meetings with such figures as most of the recent U.S. Presidents, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, and prominent entertainment figures such as Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Sammy Davis Jr.

The only recent President who did not put in an appearance there was Donald J. Trump, probably because there was some fear he would break plates and steal the silver.

On the premises of the estate at one time were paintings by Picasso, Van Gogh, Andrew Wyeth, and Monet. When Walter and Leonore Annenberg died, these paintings were donated to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The nine-hole golf course is still there, to be used by invited guests of the Annenberg Foundation Trust, who may stay overnight in one of a number of elegant cottages on the grounds.

The cactus gardens by themselves are a work of art, with some of the most elegant landscaping I have ever seen.

Fiercely Unhuggable

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It’s Hard to Be a Tree Hugger in the Desert

This Friday, I will be driving to Palm Desert in the Coachella Valley to visit my brother and sister-in-law. Consequently, I will probably not post here again until Monday January 30—and then only if I feel up to it.

This is supposed to be a nice weekend, except for the possibility of rain on Sunday and Monday. Fortunately, I noticed this week that my right front windshield wiper was starting to fall to pieces, so I had it replaced. The driver’s side windshield wiper (which on a Subaru Forester is two inches longer than the passenger side wiper) is on order.

Usually, most Southern Californians bet that whatever rain is predicted will spend itself in the mountains and leave us high and dry. Not this year, however.

It’s always fun to spend time with Dan and Lori, and I am looking forward to it.

So hasta la vista!

Lucretius on the Nature of Things

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Titus Lucretius Carus (1st Century BC)

It’s not easy to read The Nature of Things by Lucretius. Not only does he attempt to summarize the philosophy of Epicurus and the science knowledge of his day (40-55 BC), but he did in in rhymed couplets, which in this edition are translated as heptameter (“fourteeners”).

Not to worry: If you press on, you will get the gist of what Lucretius writes, and you will encounter some great passages such as this one on the role of the gods in life:

If you possess a firm grasp of these tenets, you will see
That Nature, rid of harsh taskmasters, all at once is free,
And everything she does, does on her own, so that gods play
No part. For by the holy hearts of gods, who while away
Their tranquil immortality in peace!—who can hold sway
Over the measureless universe? Who is there who can keep
Hold of the reins that curb the power of the fathomless deep?
Who can juggle all the heavens? And with celestial flame
Warm worlds to fruitfulness? And be all places at the same
Time for all eternity, to cast a shadow under
Dark banks of clouds, or quake a clear sky with the clap of thunder?
What god would send down lightning to rend his own shrines asunder?
Or withdraw to rage in desert wastes, and there let those bolts fly
That often slay the innocent and pass the guilty by?

It is a far different world than hours. Instead of the Periodical Table of the Elements, Lucretius had earth, wind, air, and fire. You can see him bending in obscure directions to explain such phenomena as magnetism, thunder, earthquakes, and plagues. Yet one could not help but admire the ingenuity of an astute observer who had no notion of Newtonian Physics, let alone Quantum Physics, yet tried his hardest to explain what he saw.

Thoughts & Prayers—Pfffft!

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AK-47 Insides

After the mass killings in California this weekend—in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay—I am tempted to make an immodest proposal. Every time N number of innocent victims are killed by a shooter, the same number of NRA members (and their families) are slaughtered in the same fashion.

It would have the effect of thinning the herd.

Insofar as the Second Amendment is concerned, in exactly what way do gun buyers constitute a “well-regulated Militia”? (Answer: In no way.)