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Air Lazarus

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The Museum of Flying in Santa Monica

Once upon a time, the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica was two or three times bigger. Founded by Donald Douglas, Jr., of Douglas Aircraft fame, it was originally located north of the Santa Monica airport beginning in 1989 and included many exhibits furnished by an independent partner. In 2002, the museum folded.

After ten years, a new, smaller museum anchored by the Donald Douglas, Jr. collection opened south of the airport in smaller quarters.

Martine and I have always liked aircraft museums. Our favorites were the Palm Springs Air Museum and the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona. What made all these aircraft museums interesting was the existence of numerous volunteer docents who piloted the planes during the wars of the late 20th century. As many of these docents reach a certain age and pass on, I suspect that the museums themselves will lose a lot of their present appeal. But for now, I think they are wonderful places to visit and learn aviation from Kitty Hawk to today.

Waco GXE Model 10 Biplane

When I first moved to Southern California, the Santa Monica Airport and much of the land surrounding it were all part of a gigantic MacDonnell Douglas Corporation factory, which after being merged out of existence sold its property to developers and to the general aviation facility that today is the Santa Monica Airport.

So even if the Museum of Flying is something of a Lazarus raised from the dead, we will continue to visit and enjoy it.

Easy Breakfast Quesadillas

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Rajas de Jalapeño

This is perhaps my most common breakfast, which I have with my morning tea. It contains only three ingredients: (1) Good quality flour tortillas; (2) Monterey Jack cheese; and (3) Pickled jalapeño peppers.

If you can’t tolerate chile peppers, I suppose you could try something mild like Ortega chiles, but I can’t imagine that would taste good. I use either canned Mexican rajas de jalapeño, which may also include pickled carrots, onion, and even pieces of cauliflower or else any pickled jalapeños.

For the cheese, I always prefer Monterey Jack. A particularly good brand on the West Coast comes from Joseph Farms and is available at Ralphs supermarkets (owned by Kroger).

Of primary importance are the flour tortillas. My brand of choice is El Comal or La Banderita. Avoid cheap flour torts that tear easily along the edges or that taste like cardboard. Unfortunately, most of the popular supermarket brands fall into this category.

To prepare the quesadillas, I preheat the oven to 350° Fahrenheit ( 175° Celsius). I take a quarter cup of jalapeños and chop them up fine. Then with a cheese slicer, I cut four slices of Monterey Jack cheese. I take two flour tortillas and on the upper half of each place two slices of cheese and half the chopped jalapeños, Then I fold the torts in two, being careful that they not tear in the process. (This is one way of learning whether you’ve bought the right flour tortillas.) Place them in the oven and cook them until the edges of the tortillas begin to turn dark brown.

It is very likely that some of the cheese will drip, so I always place a sheet of foil underneath.

The result is a bit spicy, but a very pleasant way to start your day.

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.

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.

Samhainophilia

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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 …

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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.