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Monthly Archives: November 2025

Museum … Zoo … Botanical Garden

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Walkway at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

When Martine and I were in Tucson in April, we ran into 100° Fahrenheit (37° Celsius) temperatures. While we visited the spectacular Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, I was constantly seeking deep shade and cool water. As a result, we saw only a fraction of the museum’s grounds, which were substantial. There is no doubt in my mind that we must revisit it during the winter months.

In addition to several buildings housing reptiles, birds, fish, and so on, there is a zoo along a pathway that winds through the grounds. I spent a lot of time watching the desert bighorn sheep, because I could view them from a nice shady place. We missed most of the other outdoor zoological exhibits, as well as the desert plants in their immediate vicinity.

To get an idea of the museum’s variety, click here to see the various exhibit categories.

In the vicinity of the museum are a number of other interesting sights:

Until our short visit in April, I had never visited Tucson, though Martine had long ago to visit her aunt living there.

Is Rain a Frenemy?

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L.A. Caught in the Throes of an “Atmospheric River”

It seems that Southern California is in a perpetual drought, except when we are being drenched by monster rainstorms. I love rain because it makes the surrounding hillsides green, that is, when it doesn’t send those same hillsides sliding into the ocean.

The Los Angeles River is something of a joke for most of the year. (You might remember the car chase scenes in Terminator 2 along its concrete banks.) Right now, it is a raging torrent which I would not dare to approach.

At the supermarket today, I forgot an item on my grocery list for our supper. After watching Fritz Lang’s M (1931) on TCM (Turner Classic Movies), I noticed that the rain was still coming down, so I decided to make do with miscellaneous food items I had lying around the kitchen. Why didn’t I go back to the market? For one thing, it was already dark; and L.A. drivers go crazy when there is anything heavier than a drizzle.

Fortunately, I am a bookworm and a cinephile, so I have no problem entertaining myself. Martine, however, likes to take long walks; and the weather lately has not been conducive.

Battlefield Director

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Tsutomo Yamazaki (Left) in Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963)

This is an unusual thing to say, but if I were to look at all the great film directors with a point of view of selecting the one that would make the best general on the battlefield, my choice would be Japan’s Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998).

Yesterday evening I did not post here because I was watching Kurosawa’s great noir film High and Low for the third time. The tale follows Toshiro Mifune as a shoe manufacturer whose son is kidnapped and held for ransom. Except it turns out that it is actually his live-in chauffeur’s son who is taken. In paying the ransom anyhow, Mifune impoverishes himself, losing his business, his house, and even his furniture.

Why do I feel that Kurosawa would make an able general? In no other film (except one, that I shall mention later) is there so much intelligently conveyed detail that enables a viewer to follow the police investigation in all its aspects during its 143 minute length without feeling lost. And the film gallops along like a 73 minuter Poverty Row quickie.

During its course, Kurosawa takes us into such a realistic picture of heroine addiction that, even today, would be too much for Hollywood to handle.

The only other film that so capably marshals s vast amount of detail is the same director’s Seven Samurai (1954). This is actually a film about a 16th century military campaign in which seven masterless samurai help farmers fight back an invasion of forty mounted bandits who are after their crops. Throughout the film’s 207 minute length, we are aware of what is happening in every part of the battlefield as the samurai and farmers battle the bandits. As with High and Low, the film zips along at a fast pace despite a vast amount of detail without losing its audience.

Compare these with the average current Hollywood production in which 120 minutes seems like a lifetime and the audience is slogging through a swamp shortly after the opening credits.

Vacationing in Oz

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Original Covers of Three of L. Frank Baum’s Oz Books

It’s all well and good to read serious literature, but every once in a while it is good to return to the land of childhood. Why? It is a place where imagination rules, and we can all use a little childlike imagination to see us through the consequences of our bad decisions.

After reading a serious Russian novel (Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator), I decided to read the sequel to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, namely: The Marvelous Land of Oz. In all, Baum wrote some fourteen books set in the Land of Oz, and I intend to read all of them—even the ones I have read some decades ago.

In this second book of the series, there is no Wizard, no Dorothy, no Toto, and no Kansas. We do, however, encounter the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman and even the Good Witch Glinda. As Baum was no slave to precedent, he introduces several new characters: the boy Tip, Jack Pumpkinhead, an animated sawhorse, and others. There are in addition the moderately bad witch Mombi, the feminist General Jinjur, the Gump (an animated flying machine made of inanimate spare parts), and H. M. Woggle-Bug, T. E. (The H. M. is short for Highly Magnified, and T. E. refers to his being Thoroughly Educated.)

The closest thing to a villain is Mombi, who is allied with General Jinjur and his all-girl army to rule Oz after the Scarecrow and his friends are driven out. Jinjur’s army does not come across as much of a threat, as they are armed only with knitting needles.

I plan to read one Oz book per month until I have finished the series, which I have complete on my Kindle.

“Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit”

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American Indian Poet Joy Harjo

One of my favorite American poets is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Native American Nation, who has served three terms as poet laureate of the United States. Her poetry is simply magical, as the following sample shows:

Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit

Don’t bother the earth spirit who lives here. She is working on a story. It is the oldest story in the world and it is delicate, changing. If she sees you watching she will invite you in for coffee, give you warm bread, and you will be obligated to stay and listen. But this is no ordinary story. You will have to endure earthquakes, lightning, the deaths of all those you love, the most blinding beauty. It’s a story so compelling you may never want to leave; this is how she traps you. See that stone finger over there? That is the only one who ever escaped.

Acres of Cheap Crap

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Several days ago, Martine expressed some interest in going to a Walmart … because, well, she hadn’t seen the inside of a megastore for several years. With some reluctance, I drove her to the giant Walmart in Panorama City, at the corner of Roscoe and Van Nuys. Originally, I intended to drop her off and go to a huge bookstore nearby. But then I asked myself, “Do I really need to buy more books?”

That was my mistake. For almost two hours I wandered around the store looking at all the merchandise. In the menswear department, I didn’t see any pants under 30 inches in the inseam. I looked at the shirts: They had flimsy pockets that would dump my reading glasses on the ground every time I bent over.

I guess that for some people seeing so much merchandise and so many services in one place was exhilarating. For me, it was profoundly depressing.

It brought to mind the Atlantic Mills megastore in Bedford, Ohio to which my parents took me. I remember we bought a clunky Recordak tape recorder there. Then there was the huge Fedco Store on La Cienega whose late night pharmacy I had to visit after a visit to the emergency ward for urethral strictures.

I was delighted when I got Martine to agree to leave after purchasing a box of cheap light bulbs. From there, we drove to Otto’s Hungarian Import Store and Deli in Burbank to buy some gyulai kolbasz sausage. We ate lunch nearby at Lancer’s on Victory near Magnolia. It’s one of those 1950s style coffee shops that managed to make it to the 21st century.

Weeds

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I used to subscribe to the New York Review of Books in print form, but I got lazy about reading the issues. Yet I saved all of them and am now reading them, mostly when I go out by myself to lunch. Today, at a local Egyptian Restaurant in Culver City, I read this poem by Diane Seuss in an issue dated June 23, 2022. It’s called “Weeds.”

Weeds

The danger of memory is going
to it for respite. Respite risks
entrapment. Don’t debauch
yourself by living
in some former version of yourself
that was more or less naked. Maybe
it felt better then, but you were
not better. You were smaller, as the rain
gauge must fill to the brim
with its full portion of suffering.

What can memory be in these terrible times?
Only instruction. Not a dwelling.

Or if you must dwell:
The sweet smell of weeds then.
The sweet smell of weeds now.
An endurance. A standoff. A rest.

East Is East

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Budapest Parliament

Whenever things go blooey here in Sunny California, as they are wont to do from time to time, I remind myself that I am at the center of my being an Eastern European. I may have been born in Cleveland, Ohio, but the language that spoke most intimately to my emotions was Magyar (Hungarian).

My life has been a series of shifts from east to west and back again. That has prevented me from being depressed at setbacks that have occurred. We Eastern Europeans are used to suffering. But we have our own insane pride that prevents us from falling apart.

Consequently, I love reading literature that has been translated from Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Serbian, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Russian. And whatever my politics are—and they are certainly not on the side of Vladimir Putin—I see the stories, novels, dramas, and poems the product of a people, not a political system. The people are all right, however the politics might suck.

I have always dreamed of riding from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. To see a vast country unrolling before my eyes on the long trip to the Sea of Japan. I also see myself as reading long Russian novels during that trip. Alas, I think I am now too old for such an adventurous journey.

Currently, I am reading Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator, which makes me feel these things more intensely.

Schach Jock

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Although I learned to play chess at the age of nine, I am no wizard at the game. In fact, my game is pretty mediocre. I leave pieces en prise (open to capture). I miss mates in two. I fall into opening traps. But I love the game and spend an average of an hour a day on Chess.Com solving problems, playing chess bots, and following the latest chess news.

When the conversation turns to the latest computer game, I just smirk. Chess is a game that will occupy my mind for a lifetime, not merely an intermission on TV.

If you look at all the possible combinations for white and black for just the first ten moves, the number is larger than the number of atoms in the universe. The game is over a thousand years old: It first emerged in India as the game called Chaturanga. It came to the West through Persia, where it was called Shah Mat (“The King Is Helpless”). That is where the term Checkmate arose.

I regularly play chess openings that date from the Sixteenth Century (the Ruy Lopez). There are mating patterns from the Eighteenth Century (Legal’s Mate).

I still have several shelves of classical chess books that I have pipe dreams of studying at some point. These include game collections from the likes of Bobby Fischer, Alexander Alekhine, Paul Morphy, José Raul Capablanca, and my hero, the Estonian Paul Keres.

Whatever happens, chess will have enriched my life immeasurably.

Throwing Down the Glove

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Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris

As I read today for the first time a play by French Writer Honoré de Balzac, I was reminded of the last scene in his great novel Père Goriot as Eugène de Rastignac attended the poor funeral of his old neighbor Goriot..

But just as the coffin was put in the hearse, two empty carriages, with the armorial bearings of the Comte de Restaud and the Baron de Nucingen, arrived and followed in the procession to Pere-Lachaise. At six o’clock Goriot’s coffin was lowered into the grave, his daughters’ servants standing round the while. The ecclesiastic recited the short prayer that the students could afford to pay for, and then both priest and lackeys disappeared at once. The two grave diggers flung in several spadefuls of earth, and then stopped and asked Rastignac for their fee. Eugene felt in vain in his pocket, and was obliged to borrow five francs of Christophe. This thing, so trifling in itself, gave Rastignac a terrible pang of distress. It was growing dusk, the damp twilight fretted his nerves; he gazed down into the grave and the tears he shed were drawn from him by the sacred emotion, a single-hearted sorrow. When such tears fall on earth, their radiance reaches heaven. And with that tear that fell on Father Goriot’s grave, Eugene Rastignac’s youth ended. He folded his arms and gazed at the clouded sky; and Christophe, after a glance at him, turned and went—Rastignac was left alone.

He went a few paces further, to the highest point of the cemetery, and looked out over Paris and the windings of the Seine; the lamps were beginning to shine on either side of the river. His eyes turned almost eagerly to the space between the column of the Place Vendome and the cupola of the Invalides; there lay the shining world that he had wished to reach. He glanced over that humming hive, seeming to draw a foretaste of its honey, and said magniloquently:

“Henceforth there is war between us.”

And by way of throwing down the glove to Society, Rastignac went to dine with Mme. de Nucingen.