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Tuesday at the Getty Center

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On the 781 Metro Bus to the Getty Center

In my retirement years, I sometimes drive where I’m going; sometimes I just take public transportation. The two Getty museums in Los Angeles are a good example of the advantage of traveling by bus. There is no admission fee, but parking at each museum costs twenty dollars. Compare that with an outlay of seventy cents for a round trip between Sepulveda & Exposition and the Getty Center. A big plus is that the 781 Metro bus runs every few minutes, so that waiting is not a big factor.

The reason for my visit is an exhibit entitled “William Blake: Visionary,” which closes on January 14. Organized with the cooperation of London’s Tate Museum, it includes a large number of Blake’s prints. I even dished out the money for the exhibit book. It costs a fortune, but I know I would have kicked myself had I passed up the opportunity.

In the next few days, I will write several posts about my visit to the Getty, particularly relating to William Blake, who is probably the only human being who is at one and the same time a great poet and a great visual artist.

The Getty’s Cactus Garden with Westwood and the 405 Freeway in the Background

I like to visit the Getty whenever they have a special exhibit that interests me. This time, I saw only the Blake exhibit and also a large selection of great photographs by Arthur Tress. (The Getty Center always has interesting photographic exhibits.)

Later this month, I will also trek to the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades to see an exhibit on the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Unlike the Getty Center, the Getty Villa concentrates on ancient Greek and Roman art in a building whose design is a re-created Roman country home within view of the beach.

Náthás

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My Nasal Congestion Was Nowhere So Pretty As Hers

Sometimes, from deep inside my early memories, a Hungarian word comes flying to the surface, bringing with it a whole jumble of interconnected moments from my past.

Today’s word is náthás, which was a word frequently applied to me as a child. It is pronounced like naht-hahsh, equally accented on both syllables. According to my trusty Országh Magyar-Angol Kéziszotár (translates as Handy Hungarian-English Dictionary), the word means “having a cold.” Actually, in my experience, it really means “having the symptoms of a cold, whether from an actual cold or allergy.”

In my case, it was respiratory allergies, going back to an early age. I remember all the vain attempts to unblock my nose, starting with the deceitful over-the-counter nose drops called Neo-Synephrine. It actually succeeded in unplugging the blockage for up to half a minute, immediately followed by an even more resistant blockage.

Then there was the old Hungarian remedy of filling a large pan with boiling water and mixing it with table salt. I would hold a towel over my head and bend low over the steaming salty water, breathing deeply. That didn’t work any better than the Neo-Synephrine. So much for old remedies.

Nowadays there are more effective medications and procedures. One good nasal unplugger is a sinus rinse in which salt is dissolved in distilled water and shot up each nostril using a squeeze bottle—the principle being that what goes up one nostril comes out the other, bringing with it the muck stored in the sinus cavity.

Nevertheless, I am still very much náthás, due to snorting, sneezing, and nose-blowing. That never seems to go away. I like to think of myself as a superhero in the Marvel Comic Universe, my super power being the ability to shoot great gobs of mucus at evildoers.

Death By Comfy Chair

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La-Z-Boy Maverick-582 Rocker Recliner

I have never understood why people buy those overstuffed recliners. Is it because they are tired of living and just want to sink into something soft while their body functions shut down? Never forget the old Monty Python episode in which the Spanish Inquisition uses comfy chairs as a form of (not unwelcome) torture.

All the seating in my apartment tends to be on the firm side. In fact, I refer to them as my uncomfy chairs. To that I attribute the back that, at my advanced age, my back doesn’t hurt; and I am more agile than most of my age cohort.

This brings to mind one of my favorite poems by Dylan Thomas entitled “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And so I continue to burn and rave at close of day from my uncomfy chair.

The Parts of 2023 I’d Gladly Jettison

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In the Biz Bag With Him and His Followers!

Looking back over the past year, there are a lot of persons, places, and phenomena I would gladly not have to confront in 2024—indeed, ever again.

First and foremost is America’s mumbling incompetent dictator-in-waiting. Currently, he is attempting to turn the death of a thousand cuts in court into victories. They aren’t and never will be. That goes for all his minions, those drooling red-hatted loons seated behind him at his rallies.

Mega-Billionaires, especially those in the tech sector, who want to enrich themselves by making everyone else miserable with their social media or artificial intelligence.

Time to shitcan crypto-currency once and for all. A form of anonymous, unregulated currency, it is of use only to evil dark web goons.

Quasi-celebrity influencers who foment flash mobs and twonky fashions. Like Paris Hilton, who in today’s issue of the Los Angeles Times is quoted as saying: “I also like butter and strawberry jelly on toast, then sometimes toasted bagels with strawberry cream cheese, which I’m like obsessed with.” If you come across something of that ilk in this blog, you are justified in disemboweling me.

And that’s only the beginning, but space is limited and I want to get to bed before midnight. I wish for you and yours a tolerable New Year. (Let’s not kid ourselves.)

The Man With the Hyperactive Head

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My dentist always twits me about my chewing my teeth into oblivion. I do not think I grind my teeth at night, but she thinks I do. And there are the ruined sites of three of my long lost upper teeth. two bicuspids and a molar. She also thinks I live on a diet of jalapeño chile peppers.

In truth, there is something violent about my visage. Take my sneezes: They are so powerful that I have to be prepared to go to the bathroom after a sneezing fit. I find facial tissues to be useless, as I tend to blow them to smithereens. Like my father, I frequently rupture a capillary when I erupt. In my case, it’s usually in my left nostril.

Then there are my sinuses. Whenever there is a major change in the weather (which in L.A. means just about always), I turn into mucus man. I frequently wake Martine up with my snorting, sneezing, and nose-blowing. As she has a tendency to be insomniac, she usually requests that I transfer my drainage to the couch in the living room.

Then, too, my eyelids are constantly irritated with blepharitis. In certain times of the year, usually winter, spring, summer, and fall, my eyelids itch and generate an annoying discharge.

What’s next for me? Great gobs of earwax sticking out of my ears? Saliva that roars like a waterfall? Is my head just too damned loud?

Doctor K Is Out

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It Was Decidedly My Worst Dental Visit

This happened at some point during my high school years, sometime between 1958 and 1962. I had a cavity that needed to be filled, so my parents took me to see Doctor K who had an office at the Southgate Shopping Center at the corner of Libby and Northfield Roads. My parents sat patiently in the waiting room while Dr. K drilled away at my tooth.

The time was late afternoon. Doctor K put the suction tube in my mouth and stepped out. For a very long time. In fact he left the office and went to dinner while all the moisture in my body was being sucked through the tube. He must have taken another exit, because my parents didn’t see him leave.

When he returned an hour later, there were sand dunes and cacti in my mouth. He calmly finished drilling and filled the cavity. When I stepped into the waiting room, my father and mother were annoyed at the time it took. When I told them Doctor K had left the office for an hour, my father told him he could whistle all the way to Warrensville if he wanted to be paid for his rudeness.

We never went back to Doctor K. I was all right with that.

Was I Ever a Hippie?

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You Won’t Find Me in This Picture

I arrived in Los Angeles at exactly the point when the Hippie movement was reaching its height. Many of my acquaintances looked much like the poseurs in the above photo. Oh, I had long hair all right, but nothing that was radical for the period. I went around dressed in chinos and a Jeans jacket, usually with a black cowboy hat which I bought at Disneyland.

In fact, I never really got close to any Hippies: I regarded them as not quite real, more like play actors.

There was another even more compelling reason I never became a Hippie: I had just undergone brain surgery for the removal of a pituitary tumor and had no desire to experiment with recreational drugs. In the late 1960s, I did not think I was long for this world. I had no desire to rush my exit from this life.

Though not drawn to the Hippies, I was something of a political radical. For a brief time, I attended meetings of the Progressive Labor Party at UCLA, but found studying Marx’s Surplus Theory of Value breathtakingly boring and the girls in the group heartbreakingly ill-favored.

Due to the influence of my late friend Norm Witty, I hung out for a while with The Resistance, which protested the Vietnam War by attempting to interfere with the draft process. In fact, I sent my draft card back to my draft board in Cleveland, fully expecting to be arrested for two felonies ([1] Returning my draft card and [2] Refusing to carry a draft card on my person) and sent to a Federal prison. It turns out that so many of my fellow students returned their draft cards that the Federal Government decided it was too expensive to prosecute and imprison the offenders.

America’s Love Affair With Billionaires

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Elon Musk

Why do Americans shower their billionaires with a level of adoration normally reserved for deities and saints? I think back to the Medicis and the Borgias during the Italian Renaissance. As J. H. Plumb wrote, “Commercial capitalism, struggling the the framework of feudalism, learned, through Italy, not only how to express itself in art and learning, but also how to make an art of life itself.”

Not so today, however! Donald Trump has given us golden toilet bowls, ornate golf courses, and tried to take away our democracy. Elon Musk managed to convince thousands of Americans that he was a genius—until he spent $44 billion buying Twitter and running it into the ground. After his latest anti-Semitic tirade, I think even most Tesla owners are rethinking their allegiances.

I cannot think of a billionaire today who has done anything but engage in self-aggrandizement. Instead of a Renaissance, we are now in a period that can only be described as Anti-Renaissance.

What ever happened to patronage of the arts? Oh, it still exists at the millionaire level; but not among the Trumps, Musks, and Bezoses of this world. The think the last billionaire to show any moves in this direction was Bill Gates of Microsoft fame.

The Book Collector

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My apartment is home to my collection of books, five to six thousand volumes in all. In addition to my library, which is dedicated to my collection, I have crowded book-cases in every room of my apartment, including the kitchen and bathroom.

There was a time when I could not visit a bookstore without buying several new or used books. In addition, I purchased books from EBay, Abebooks.Com, and a fair number of other Internet book dealers.

Right now, I am reading with great enjoyment Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer (1815), the second of his Waverley Novels. Forty or fifty years ago, I would think nothing of trying to find the complete works of any author I liked. In fact, at one time I owned a complete hardbound set of the Waverley Novels. Now I only have some twenty selected titles—but in nice editions. In this, I resemble Dominie Sampson in Guy Mannering:

The lawyer afterwards compared his mind to the magazine of a pawnbroker, stowed with goods of every description, but so cumbrously piled together, and in such total disorganisation, that the owner can never lay his hands upon any one article at the moment he has occasion for it.

Guilty as charged! But now that I am approaching my eightieth year, I would like to find a good home for most of my books. It helps—sad to say—that bookstores, in disappearing from the landscape, furnish less of a temptation.

Tomorrow, I will travel downtown to return some library books (and get some new ones). I will be strongly tempted to visit the (appropriately named) Last Bookstore at 5th and Spring Streets and check out their more obscure Sir Walter Scott titles, such as Peveril of the Peak, Count Robert of Paris, Anne of Geierstein, and The Fortunes of Nigel.

But, really, who am I kidding? Will I really read all of Scott’s novels? If I live long enough, I sure would like to try. But why buy the books when I can check them out of the Central Library or download them on my Amazon Kindle. Old habits die v-e-r-y hard.

I Dodge a Bullet

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Wednesday, November 1, 6:00 AM

Life is strange when you don’t have a pituitary gland. Mine was removed by surgery in September 1966. On Wednesday I woke up early to go to the bathroom. After I did by business, I got up and … and … and …

B L A C K O U T

When consciousness returned, I was bleeding from a large bump on the left of my forehead and I felt as if one of my ribs was broken. Imagine Martine’s surprise when she woke up to go to the john about an hour later! There I lay, covered in blood and unable to raise myself due to (1) pain from my broken rib and (2) general weakness due to adrenal insufficiency.

Without a functioning pituitary, one has no thyroid function, no sex hormones, and—oh, yes—no adrenaline. All those have to be supplied from outside the body. Those early morning hours can be killers. Ingmar Bergman had a good reason to call it “The Hour of the Wolf.” At my request, Martine got me a glass of water and five 10mg tabs of Hydrocortisone.

Eventually Martine has to call 9-1-1 to get an ambulance. I couldn’t just lie on the bathroom floor forever. The emergency medical technicians took one look at me, hoisted me up, and trundled me of to the UCLA Medical Center, where I spent a couple of days in the intensive care unit and an observation ward.

I strongly suspect that this is how I will leave this world. At some point, the adrenal debt will be too high; and there will be a general system shutdown. Not a particularly painful exit.

For the time being, I’ll still be here. I hope.