There is something uniquely satisfying about eating the peasant cuisine of the area in which one lives. In the case of Los Angeles, that means chiles, beans, and corn tortillas. I even prefer honey in which the bees gather pollen from mesquite and desert wildflowers.
Today, I had chilaquiles for brunch with refried beans and eggs over easy at Gilbert’s El Indio Restaurant in Santa Monica. What are chilaquiles? You see the photo of corn tortillas above. They cut into wedges, fried, and cooked in a tomato salsa. I’ve had them—mostly for breakfast—all over Mexico, even in Yucatán. Nothing simpler, yet eminently satisfying when prepared by someone who knows what he or she is doing.
Gilbert’s El Indio Restaurant
The benefit of eating foods native to your area is mostly psychological, but my guess is it’ll do a lot more for you than any so-called “superfood” like kale, beets, or acai berries.
If you’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s film Casino about the mob days in Las Vegas, you’ve seen Sharon Stone in the role of Ginger McKenna as well as Robert DeNiro as Sam “Ace” Rothstein. Throughout the film, names were changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty. The actual characters were named Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Geri McGee Rosenthal.
Between 1976 and 1983, Rosenthal was in charge of four casinos that were secretly skimming profits to Chicago and other Midwestern mobsters. As a nationally known sports bettor, he had in 1969 married a Vegas showgirl named Geri McGee.
Vegas Showgirl Geri McGee
Geri was one of those tall, lovely showgirls for whom most men would sell their souls. Not that Lefty had not sold his soul early on, but hooking up with Geri turned out to be a nightmare. Although Lefty and Geri had two children together, Geri started taking drugs and having a not-well-hidden affair with mob enforcer Tony “The Ant” Spilotro (played by Joe Pesci in the film).
As her marriage began to implode, Geri had a very open break with her family and took thousands in cash and jewelry that Lefty had in a joint safe deposit box to prove his trust in Geri. She left for Los Angeles and was dead within months of a drug overdose. Lefty, meanwhile, was the victim of a car bomb, which, fortunately for him, he escaped without major injury. But shortly after that, he was finished in Vegas and moved on to Laguna Niguel, California, and then Boca Raton, Florida, where he died in 2008.
Sharon Stone in the Role of Geri
As men, most of us dream of falling for a long-stemmed beauty like Geri McGee, but it rarely ends well. There’s something about the whole mechanism of sexual desire which seems to militate against long-term happiness.
I have always loved reading the comics page in whatever newspaper my family or I ever got. Oh, I would scan the news first, and even the editorial page, but it was always the funnies that got my closest attention. You see, the news stories were to my mind, more subject to distortion than the funnies. The funnies are a clear indication what people are really thinking, but the news stories are typically designed to keep readers tense and upset.
On December 3, the Los Angeles Times got into my bad books by canceling one of my favorite strips, “9 Chickweed Lane” by Brooke McEldowney. It was replaced a couple weeks later by “Lu Ann,” which is considerably more tepid in every way.
And what excited the ire of some woke nincompoop leading to the decision? It was the following pane from the December 1 offering:
Huh? Pen Sallywright shoots down a Jap zero, commenting, “He was in the wrong hemisphere. He had it coming if you get my drift.” Now this is all part of a fantasy involving an RAF officer named Charge Chucker, and a mysterious, sexy Polish (and possibly space alien) spy who wears a ray gun holstered to her thigh. You can tell it’s a fantasy because Pen Sallywright shoots down a Zero with a hand weapon, and because she’s like from outer space.
I really do hate people who are too effing woke for their own good. I still read “9 Chickweed Lane” on a website which can be accessed here.
There used to be some awfully boring comics years back when “Gasoline Alley,“ “Mary Worth,” and “Rex Morgan MD” were running. But there were some great strips as well, such as “Pogo” and “Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.” Ah well, times change.
I am always enchanted by poems based on paintings that I love. And my favorite painting of the Eighteenth Century is Antoine Watteau’s “The Embarkation for Cythera,” a promise of love in the offing, but no delivery for certain. Cythera, or Kythira, is an island off the Peloponnese. The following poem was written by another islander, from Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, namely Derek Walcott. It is poem XX in the sequence of his collection Midsummer and called simply “Watteau”:
The amber spray of trees feather-brushed with the dusk,
the ruined cavity of some spectral château, the groin
of a leering satyr eaten with ivy. In the distance, the grain
of some unreapable, alchemical harvest, the hollow at
the heart of all embarkations. Nothing stays green
in that prodigious urging towards twilight;
in all of his journeys the pilgrims are in fever
from the tremulous strokes of malaria’s laureate.
So where is Cythera? It, too, is far and feverish,
it dilates on the horizon of his near-delirium, near
and then further, it can break like the spidery rigging
of his ribboned barquentines, it is as much nowhere
as these broad-leafed islands, it is the disease
of elephantine vegetation in Baudelaire,
the tropic bug in the Paris fog. For him, it is the mirror
of what it is. Paradise is life repeated spectrally,
an empty chair echoing the emptiness.
Louis Jouvet (Right) Sweating a Suspect (2nd from Left)
The French criminal justice system is very different from our own. I have just finished reading Georges Simenon’s Maigret and the Burglar’s Wife [Maigret et la grande perche] (1951); plus I have just recently seen Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film Quai des Orfêvres (1947). In both works, the investigating inspectors give their suspects the third degree. It is a process of intimidating the suspect until he or she talks, no matter how long it takes. In the film, there was a kind of tag team of interrogation, involving Inspector Antoine (Louis Jouvet) and the two detectives above with cigarettes hanging from their lips.
I wonder if things have changed that much in the last seventy years or so. France’s laws are based on the Napoleonic Code of 1804, in which there is a presumption of guilt rather than innocence, as in English Common Law. Suspects could be held in custody for longer periods of time until the evidence was clear.
In the Simenon novel, Inspector Maigret proceeds with the arrest even before this point, because he is so sure that the evidence is forthcoming. In the movie, the suspects, Maurice Martineau and Jenny Lamour, are convinced they will be framed by Inspector Antoine, who actually frees them when he gets a confession (albeit by sustained intimidation) from the real murderer.
It is interesting to see and read about police procedurals from other countries. In the United States, we have adopted English law. I rather suspect that, in the end, both legal systems are equally fair—or unfair.
I have completed my Januarius Project for January 2022. Just to remind you, I typically reserve an entire month at or near the beginning of the year to introduce myself to authors whose work I have not hitherto read. Below is the summary, beginning with the best books and ending with the one stinko book.
Outstanding
Martha Gellhorn, Travels with Myself and Another. She might be Ernest Hemingway’s ex-wife, and she may well be as good if not better than her former hubby.
M F K Fischer, Two Towns in Provence. Consists of two parts, a great book on Aix-en-Provence, and a merely very very good book on Marseilles.
Saint Augustine, Confessions. I’d put this one off for decades, but it is really great, especially the chapter about time.
Kenzaburo Oe, A Personal Matter. A Nobel Prizewinner I will have to read more of.
Ben Loory, Stories for the Nighttime and Some for the Day. A great original short story collection of fantasy and horror.
Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Fearful Void. A solo journey across the width of the Sahara that didn’t pan out, though this book about it certainly did.
Derek Walcott, Midsummer. A Nobel Prizewinning poet from the Caribbean. Super stuff.
Good
Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. What the Marquis and Pornhub have in common.
Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston. A promising neo-noir author.
Edward Whittemore, Quin’s Shanghai Circus. Wild, exotic, and interesting.
Eric Jager, The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat. The 2021 Ridley Scott movie was based on this medieval thriller.
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: Origins of the Avante-Garde in France 1885 to World War I. How four French artists (a painter, a composer, a poet, and a playwright) influenced modern art.
So-So
Pete Beatty, Cuyahoga. A weird fantasy on the early history of Cleveland, the city of my birth.
Meghan Abbott, Die a Little. Vaguely promising, but typical of a New Yorker who knows very little about L.A.
Peter Theroux, Translating LA: A Tour of the Rainbow City. Better than most, but nearly so good as his brother Paul’s work.
Stinko
William Beckford, Vathek. This 1786 oriental fantasy is still studied in college. Why?
All in all, this year’s Januarius project was a rousing success. Twelve out of the sixteen authors I read for the first time are worth following up on in the months and years to come.
There is something dreamlike in the paintings of Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), mistakenly nicknamed Douanier Rousseau (he never worked for customs). Perhaps his most famous painting is that of the Sleeping Gypsy, shown above, in the presence of a lion, a stringed instrument, and a piece of pottery. Many of Rousseau’s paintings are set in the jungle or the desert, though he himself never visited either.
Below is one of his jungle scenes:
This painting is title Dreams of Henri Rousseau. The two jungle cats in the foreground have the same expression of the eyes as the lion in Sleeping Gypsy. As the art historian Daniel Catton Rich wrote:
His approach was far from literal. Inspired by his vision he arbitrarily rewove the appearance of nature to suit his purpose. The long series of imaginative paintings show Rousseau obsessed by one repeated scheme of composition. He imagines a strongly lighted distance against which he silhouettes darker forms of trees or foliage. Plane upon plane is piled up in intricate design, and usually two small figures focus the eye on the foreground. This same ‘dream picture’ haunted him from the days of “Carnival Evening” to the last jungle picture he painted.
Hitherto tied to the more realistic classics, Henri Rousseau represented an abrupt journey in the direction of modern art. His reality was what he dreamed it to be. Fortunately, it was close enough to actual reality in its intent if not its execution to remain mainstream long after many masterpieces of abstract expressionism fall by the wayside.
The following poem by Derek Walcott is from his collection entitled Midsummer. Born on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and passed away in 2017. The name of the poem is the Roman numeral LIII (not to be confused with Super Bowl LIII):
There was one Syrian, with his bicycle, in our town. I didn’t know if he was a Syrian or an Assyrian. When I asked him his race, about which Saroyan had written that all that was left were seventy thousand Assyrians, where were sixty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine? he didn’t answer, but smiled at the length of our street. His pupils flashed like the hot spokes of a chariot, or the silver wires of his secondhand machine. I should have asked him about the patterns of birds migrating in Aramaic, or the correct pronunciation of wrinkled rivers like “Tagus.” Assyria was far as the ancient world that was taught us, but then, so was he, from his hot-skinned camels and tents. I was young and direct and my tense was the present; if I, in my ignorance, had distorted time, it was less than some tyrant’s indifference that altered his future. He wore a white shirt. A black hat. His bicycle had an iron basket in front. It moved through the mirage of sugar-cane fields, crediting suits to the cutters. Next, two more Syrians appeared. All three shared a store behind which they slept. After that, there was a sign with that name, so comical to us, of mythical spade-bearded, anointed, and ringleted kings: ABDUL. But to me there were still only seventy thousand Assyrians, and all of them lived next door in a hot dark room, muttering a language whose sound had winged lions in it, and birds cut into a wall.
It was the night of January 14, 2020. I was scheduled to take a flight on Volaris to Guadalajara, Mexico, and then on to Mérida in Yucatán. The Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX was crowded with Chinese returning to their country. Most of the flights were to Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, and other major cities on the Chinese mainland. My Mexico flight was one of the few in the wee hours of the morning that was to a Western Hemisphere destination.
A month earlier, on December 1, 2019, a patient was admitted to a hospital in Wuhan in Hubei Province, China, with a strange case of pneumonia. I didn’t know anything about the official Chinese coverup of the disease until around January 24, when I was staying at the Hotel Lopez in Campeche, where I had access to the Al Jazeera news channel in English on my TV. The whole time I stayed there, the news was filled with pictures of Chinese healthcare personnel in hazmat suits. There were just then beginning to be cases of the unknown disease in the United States, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, Viet Nam, Taiwan, and Nepal.
By the time I returned to the United States on February 7, mass quarantines were in effect in various countries around the globe. A month later, in the middle of March, Martine and I attended a Hungarian folk dance performance of Kárpátok before submitting ourselves to the lockdown the next day.
There is an interesting chronology of the first days of the Covid-19 outbreak available by clicking here. Fortunately, we managed to avoid getting the disease; and my fingers are crossed that we never will.
It’s difficult to imagine Robert Frost writing a poem which is albeit partially about the desert. Although he is most often associated with New England, Frost was actually born in San Francisco. The name of the poem is “Desert Places”:
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it—it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Tarnmoor 
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