Here’s another reblog, once again proving that my feelings about the Holidays have not changed.
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The Man Who Killed Thanksgiving
Great Insults in Literature: One of a Series
Skarp-Hedin in Njalls Saga
We are in Medieval Iceland, and the warrior son of Njall tells a chieftain, “You really ought to pick from your teeth the pieces from the mare’s arse you ate before coming to the Thing [Assembly].”
Is Rain a Frenemy?
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.
Acres of Cheap Crap
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.
Samhainophilia
The Winner: Most Popular and Guilt-Free Holiday
There is a such a word as samhainophobia, which means hatred of Halloween. By applying the principal of parallelism, there must be such a word as samhainophilia, meaning love of Halloween. According to Wikipedia:
Samhain is a Gaelic festival on 1 November marking the end of the harvest season and beginning of winter or the “darker half” of the year. It is also the Irish and Scottish Gaelic name for November. Celebrations begin on the evening of 31 October, since the Celtic day began and ended at sunset. This is about halfway between the autumnal equinox and winter solstice. It is one of the four Gaelic seasonal festivals along with Imbolc, Bealtaine, and Lughnasa.
We don’t celebrate Imbolc, Bealtaine, or Lughnasa very much any more; but Samhain, or Halloween, is continue to grow more and more popular. Think about it: There isn’t any guilt associated with buying a few bucks worth of candy and giving it to kids. On the other hand, you have to cook up a huge complicated feast for Thanksgiving and pretend to be nice to all your most objectionable relatives.
And don’t even get me started about Christrmas! You have to kill a tree, decorate it with expensive ornaments, buy expensive gifts for everybody, and do all the same stuff required for Thanksgiving, except maybe you don’t have to serve turkey at your holiday feast.
Then there are all those other holidays: You have to set off an explosive on Independence Day, blowing off a finger or limb. You have to get drunk and endanger your marriage at a New Years office party. And so on and so on.
Heck, I’ll take the candy any day.
The above photo was taken at Los Angeles’s Grier Musser Museum of Victoriana. Martine and I spent a pleasant afternoon visiting the museum owners, Susan and Rey Tejada, who live on the premises. They have an impressive collection of holiday-related books, animated displays, and figurines. I spent over an hour looking at 3-D First World War images on a stereopticon. They also have a great collection of pop-up books of every description.
I Didn’t Like L.A. at First …
Downtown Los Angeles 2011
It took a few years for me to get to like Los Angeles. I had grown up in Cleveland, Ohio—nobody’s idea of a beautiful city. I was used to red brick buildings overlaid with grime, along with hot humid summers and unrelievedly grim winters. My first opinion of Southern California was, “This place just isn’t real!”
Oh, it was real all right. After enduring earthquakes and floods and smog and wildfires, I saw that L.A. had its own demons, which were more intermittent. (In Cleveland, they were pretty constant.)
When I was in college trying to decide where to go to grad school to study film history and criticism, I remember reading a snide book (whose title I forget) about a state whose residents were called Procals (short for Pro-California) whose residents endlessly plugged their state as “God’s country.”
The part that sticks in my mind was the description of the Pacific Coast Highway as it followed the coast north from Santa Monica. Anyhow, the highway was always being covered with destructive landslides. Well, now I live a scant two miles from that road. It is incredibly beautiful, but I haven’t the heart to drive it ever since the January wildfire that destroyed Pacific Palisades. Too many of my favorite places have been burned to a crisp.
Am I a Procal? No, not at all. There are too many people in Southern California. Too many of the recent arrivals are homeless people who live in tents pitched any which way on sidewalks, surrounded by piles of trash. They have taken a lot of the shine off Los Angeles. I still love the place, but I am all to conscious that no place ever remains the same over the decades.
The Los Angeles Police Museum
On York Boulevard in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles sits the Los Angeles Police Museum with three stories of exhibits on the history of policing in the City of Angels (and Bad-Asses).
Originally, we intended to visit the Heritage Square Museum with its Victorian mansions that were moved to a lot alongside the 110 (Pasadena) Freeway. Unfortunately, they were closed for a fund raising event, so we had to find an alternate. We had visited the LAPD Museum a couple years ago, so we decided to drive north and check to see if it was open. Fortunately, we were in luck.
The second floor has three interesting exhibits that are the heart of the museum:
- The 1963 kidnapping of LAPD officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger by two hoods. Hettinger managed to escape, but Campbell was executed in a Kern County onion field. Joseph Wambaugh wrote a novel about the incident in his novel The Onion Field.
- The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in May 1974, in which six members of the organization were killed when the LAPD attacked the house they were in.
- Most interesting to me was the 1997 North Hollywood shootout between two heavily armed bank robbers and several hundred police officers. One of the exhibits was a video of the actual event.
Still from the February 1997 Bank Robbery
Afterwards, Martine and I had lunch and went to one of our favorite stores, the Galco Soda Pop Stop on York Boulevard. They sell an incredible selection of soda pop, beer, and wine from all over the world, in addition to nostalgic candies and toys from the 1950s and 1960s.
Deport Trump!
I would send him to one of the following places: Somalia, Sudan, Venezuela, Ukraine, or, better yet, one of the Indian Ocean low-lying islands about to be submerged as a result of global warming.
At Saint Sophia
Details of Mosaic at Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral
This was the second Greek Festival at Saint Sophia since the end of the Covid-19 lockdown. It wasn’t like it used to be before the epidemic hit. Nonetheless, Martine and I enjoyed ourselves with some excellent spanakopita (spinach and feta cheese in a pastry).
We spent an hour in what is the most beautiful church in Los Angeles, whose building was spearheaded by American movie executive Charles P. Skouras. During services, Skouras controlled the lighting in the church from his reserved pew in the left aisle. Never mind that he was a bit of a control freak, but his splendid church is worth visiting. It sits on Normandie one block south of Pico Boulevard.
As America turns from being a country that welcomed minorities to one that imprisons and deports them, it is inevitable that, as time passes, the celebrations will become less ethnic, the food less authentic, and the parishioners more English-speaking. Also, we miss Father John Bakas who served for twenty-seven years as Dean of the Cathedral, but who retired in 2023.
I’ll still try to show up at the festivals, even though I am Hungarian and Martine is French. We love Greek food and find Orthodox Christianity more genuinely welcoming.
Saint Sophia’s Greekfests used to be held during the summer. The temperature today was perfect (in the mid-seventies).
Tarnmoor 
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