I find myself liking Barry Gifford’s work more the more I read him. Here is a poem called “True Love.” And I didn’t even know he wrote poetry!
True Love
Your sickness made me
a little sick, it's
true—I still
feel it
Mayakovsky got down
on his knees
and declared
his love
to his last
mistress
a few hours after
he'd met her
Remember me
at the hotel
in Paris,
on my knees
in the lift?
We're all the same
men of too much passion
and a little talent—
some a little more
than others
We fool ourselves
into thinking
we're strong
then complain
the rest of our lives
crippled by
the consequences
As I sit at the computer writing this blog, I am hearing a series of small explosions as firebugs everywhere are setting off illegal fireworks. Did all this happen because of our national anthem with its “rocket’s red glare,” or is it just some universal male incendiaries’ attempt to see how much of a bang they could get out of life without losing their fingers and toes?
I tend to ignore most holidays. The closest I came to celebrating the Glorious Fourth was to serve corn on the cob for dinner. No barbecue. No firecrackers. No patriotic movies or songs. No flags. No red, white, and blue.
[BANG! A particularly loud explosion just went off nearby.]
It is ironical that the people who most clothe themselves in the American flag are people who want to destroy what our country stands for. On January 26, 2021, the insurrection in Washington looked from a distance like a patriotic gathering. It was only when you zoomed in closer that you found just how appalling it all was. I’ll bet the attendees at that particular hullabaloo are second to no one in setting off fireworks and waving the flag—that is, those who are not serving time in prison.
So here I am, a guy who loves his country but doesn’t feel he has to prove it to anybody.
Family On Summer Beach Vacation Run Out Of Sea Towards Camera
Ah yes, Paradise on Earth. As a people, we have traditionally viewed summer beach vacations as the closest one could get to Heaven while alive. When I first came out to California in the late 1960s, I thought so, too. While working part-time at System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, I spent many afternoons lying on a towel and reading steamy fiction like Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.
The water was fun to a certain extent, but I was never a board or body surfer, though I went in often enough to be savaged by the occasional rough wave. Also, I tended to burn—especially as I had no one to slather my back with sun tan lotion.
While I live only two miles from the beach at Santa Monica, I don’t spend time there any more, unless I take a walk on the boardwalk connecting Santa Monica to Venice. Part of the reason is that the water is more polluted than ever, especially because we are only 20-30 miles (32-48 km) from the nation’s largest port, where freighters and tankers regularly foul the waters with petrochemical waste.
So when Martine and I go to Hawaii in a couple months, are we planning for any beach time? Not really. Although the waters at Waikiki are less polluted, the sun is stronger; and we both have fair skin. We are more interested in visiting Honolulu as a destination rather than trying to live in a pharmaceutical commercial.
I suppose if we lived east of the Mississippi, we would yearn for sunshine; but, living in Southern California, we have sunshine on most days of the year. In fact, September tends to be one of the hottest months of the year in Los Angeles. So we are likely escaping even hotter (albeit drier) weather at home.
Vladimir Putin’s Daughters: Mariya Putina and Katerina Tikhonova
Although it is well known that Vladimir Putin is divorced and seeing a gymnast named Alina Kabaeva, he has had two daughters by his ex-wife Lyudmila, a former airline stewardess. The girls were born in 1985 and 1986 respectively and are now in their thirties.
Both girls went to school under assumed names and were carefully shielded from the spotlight. Because both are wealthy, after the invasion of Ukraine, they were sanctioned by the U.S. and its allies. It is suspected that Putin has showered the girls with large amounts of rubles, making them suspect as oligarchs in their own right.
For the last few days, I have been re-reading the last two novels of William Gibson’s sci-fi Sprawl trilogy. The Sprawl is Gibson’s take on how the Boston to Washington DC corridor will develop in time to be the largest urban area in the world. The trilogy consists of:
Neuromancer (1984), in which the term cyberspace was first introduced
Count Zero (1986)
Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)
The 1980s was a time when the United States was awed by the growth of the Japanese economy. Throughout the trilogy, the yakuza, or Japanese underworld, has a presence—along with Haitian Voodoo gods such as Baron Samedi and Papa Legba, who seem to have taken up residence in cyberspace.
I do not think it is possible to reprise the plot of any of these novels in a coherent way, and I am sure I will forget most of the details within a week or two. What I will not forget, however, is the wild imagination that Gibson displays in his work. For instance, many scenes in Mona Lisa Overdrive take place in a barren New Jersey rust belt area known as Dog Solitude.
One of the difficulties of summarizing any of these novels is that, typically, the action takes place in numerous locales with numerous characters, many of whom have numerous aliases.
For some reason, I have not read any Gibson for a number of years. Now I am hooked again.
There are untold thousands of Meso-American archeological sites scattered through Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. Sometimes, it’s fun to visit some of the lesser-known sites. I have particularly fond memories of Dzibilchaltún, which is about 10 miles (16 kilometers) north of Mérida. It was the first Maya ruin I visited back in 1975 with my guide Manuel Quiñones Moreno. We set on the steps of a temple and played several games of chess, which I lost handily.
So it was fun to visit it again in 2020. Now there was an entrance hall, an admission fee, and a rather nice museum. Plus, the cenote was filled with children diving into the limestone-cooled waters.
The Temple of the Seven Dolls
Above is the most famous structure at Dzibilchaltún, the Temple of the Seven Dolls, named after a number of figurines that were found by archeologists buried under one of the altars.
The Seven Dolls Buried in the Temple
Dzibilchaltún is not a world class beauty like Uxmal, Chichén Itza, Copán, or Tikál, but it helps fill in vital parts of the Maya story. Although it doesn’t have a lot of first-class structures, the city was inhabited for over a thousand years. It was close to the coastal salt flats that led to the one item most frequently used in the coastal trade with other peoples, namely: salt.
And I have happy memories because this is one of the places where I began my travels as a young man.
When I go downtown to the Central Library, I travel by bus and train to avoid paying the usual exorbitant parking rates (upwards of $30 in some places). This afternoon, when I got off the train to transfer to the Santa Monica #14 bus, I ran into a hard-core racist. It was ugly and disgusting.
He was sitting on the bus bench next to mine talking to himself. He obviously hated Asians, so he was enumerating the many things about Asians that teed him off. When three cute Mexican high school girls walked by talking in Spanish, he switched topics and complained that they were speaking Spanish in his United States.
This character was probably in his late twenties, with a skateboard and a cart full of clothing and other miscellaneous items. He didn’t appear to be homeless: He was relatively well dressed, and he boarded the #16 bus headed to Brentwood, which is a high rent district to the north.
At one point, he looked to me for confirmation of his racist patter. He received the shock of his life when the old white man at his right answered him in Hungarian, inviting him in the Magyar language to be sodomized by a horse. His response? “Another effing furriner!”
Michael York and Jenny Agutter in Logan’s Run (1976)
The 1970s were a lonely decade for me. At the beginning of the decade, I was still a Master’s Candidate in UCLA’s film school, but rapidly discovering that the politics of the department were pushing me away. At the same time, I was recovering from a 1966 brain surgery that removed a pituitary tumor, as well as what was left of the pituitary gland. I looked absurdly young, yet felt that I was, for all intents and purposes, a hopeless celibate from Mars.
Cable TV introduced me to a number of actresses who were all too willing to be nude on screen. They included Sylvia Kristel of Emmanuelle fame, the gorgeous Nastassja Kinski, and Britt Ekland. But my favorite was Jenny Agutter, a classy looking Brit who showed off her stuff in:
Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971)
Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run (1976)
Sidney Lumet’s Equus (1977)
Monte Hellman’s China 9 Liberty 37 (1978)
Jenny Agutter and David Gulpilil in Walkabout (1971)
My friend Alain called my interest in these young, delicious actresses a form of “morose delectation.” I am sure he was right. Fortunately, I got through the 1970s and discovered that I was not from Mars: I was just another lonely earthling.
I am always delighted to hear from an old friend with whom I have been out of touch for a while. Today, I received an e-mail from Mona Mistriel, with whom I had worked at Lewis, Joffe & Company for a few years back in the mid 2000s. She had been in Tucson and Sedona in Arizona and is now in Ventura, about an hour north of me.
Her two sons are now fully grown and reflect well on the care she had taken as a single mother with them, through good times and bad.
Mona is a natural healer and has been an influence (along with Martine) on nutritional supplements I am taking, with some success, to improve my health.
I look forward to meeting with her in a couple of weeks. Martine and I look forward to taking her out to dinner here in LA.
Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd as the Two Crazy Guys
The following repost is from April 25, 2013. It refers to the Tsarnaev brothers who used pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon that year.
You may recall those two Wild & Crazy guys from Czechoslovakia, the brothers Yortuk and Georg Festrunk, on Saturday Night Live. As they shimmied across the stage in search of “foxes, ” they displayed an exquisite misunderstanding what the United States was all about. In the case of Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd, the result was comedy. In the case of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, two Chechen brothers from Dagestan, the result was death and disorder.
In the years to come, one of the greatest dangers to America will be the failure of immigrants from cultures vastly different from our own to adapt to the prevailing culture of the U.S. Even the mother returned to Russia, leaving several arrest warrants for shoplifting in her wake. The streets of America are not paved with gold. They are fraught with dangers not understood by people who have been influenced by our popular culture without understanding the particular demons that we in the States have to contend with in our daily lives.
After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, my parents took in two sets of refugees. The first was a mother and son who thought that, now they were in America, everything would be golden. That ended badly when Feddike, the son, was sent to a juvenile correctional facility. Next was Lászlo, a young man in his twenties, who also quickly fell afoul of the law—whereupon my mother and father resolved not to take in any more refugees from the Mother Country.
I do not mean to imply that immigration is bad, but that American culture sends misleading vibes to the rest of the world. People who are not thoughtful and who think that just being on American soil is the solution to all their problems are more likely to go astray. No, they must be ready to roll up their sleeves and start working long and hard toward their goals.
The Tsarnaev brothers should be an object lesson to American officials that they have to probe more deeply than mere external circumstances when opening the doors of the henhouse to potential predators.
Tarnmoor 
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