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Looking Ahead to the Rains

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Path in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

Living as I do at the edge of a vast desert, I am more than a little interested in the prospect of rain. In the desert, rain can be a serious matter. In the mid 1970s, I went camping with some friends to Death Valley. On the morning we were to return home, a thin layer of snow covered the ground—but that was not all. Shortly after we took the left turn onto California Route 178 towards Trona, we ran into a flash flood. We did the right thing: We waited it out. It took about a half hour for the waters to subside.

Soon it will be the Mexican Monsoon rainy season in Arizona. Large amounts of rain will fall on scattered areas throughout the state, and there will be flash floods galore.

What concerns me more directly is the news that this will be a major El Niño year. That means we can expect heavy rains beginning in the late autumn and possibly lasting to early spring. The Los Angeles River, which for most of its length is a concrete-lined flood channel, will be raging through the city carrying imprudent passersby and pets toward Long Beach Harbor.

The flood control channels which, most of the time, are standing jokes become terrifying when huge amounts of water are suddenly dumped on Southern California’s desert landscape. I remember one storm in the 1980s which made me search out alternate routes on the way home. Just about every street was flooded, and the storm drains were overloaded. It took me over an hour to drive the two miles to return home from work.

Generally, Martine and I like the rains. It’s nice to see green hills surrounding Los Angeles in the fall rather than the dry, dusty mountains we usually see. (Of course, we pay for that lush vegetation when the wildfires begin.)

Ozu Part III

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Shima Iwashita as a Bride in Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon (1962)

Last Tuesday will Turner Classic Movies’ (TCM) last installment of its Yasujiro Ozu film festival. During the month of May, I saw a total of thirteen films directed by Ozu, missing only four of those shown. And I will try to see the four I missed sometime in the next two weeks using TCM’s “Watch Now” feature, if they are still around. The four I missed were all shown in the middle of the night. I am, alas, too old now to lose too much of my beauty sleep.

It used to be that I would wake up at 3 am to watch Edgar G. Ulmer’s Babes in Bagdad or John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, but that was many years ago, when I was a fanatical adherent of the politique des auteurs. I will explain what that means in another post to be written soon.

The films I saw Tuesday were four in number:

  • Floating Weeds (1957), not to be confused with 1934’s silent A Story of Floating Weeds, of which it was a remake.
  • Late Autumn (1960).
  • An Autumn Afternoon (1962), which was the director’s last film.
  • Equinox Flower (1958).

As usual, I loved all four films, though I thought the earlier A Story of Floating Weeds, although a silent, was better than the 1957 Floating Weeds.

All the Ozu films I saw were released by Shochiku Studio. Ozu was nothing if not consistent in his loyalty to the studio.

As a special favor to my readers, I will refrain from future posts about Ozu for a period lasting up to a year. By then, my enthusiasm will be rekindled and I will enthuse about the Japanese director’s work yet again.

A Sight You Cannot Unsee

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My Apologies for the Quality of This Picture

You know what an earworm is: It’s a catchy piece of music that keeps running through your head and you cannot “unhear.” Although I have visited Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Northridge many times, I saw an image on the wall that I cannot unsee. At the far left of the photo above is an image of the crucifixion with several saints gathered around the foot of the cross. You can see a figure in green at the extreme lower right of the image. If the photo were not so dimly lit, it would show a grieving Ruth Buzzi. The bearded figure above her is a dead ringer for Kris Kristofferson.

As the church was built in the 1960s and the images on its walls were probably painted in Europe, I am sure that the resemblance is not intentional.

Martine and I attended the Greek Festival held at the church this weekend. We always spend about an hour in the church looking at the ornate artwork throughout the nave and iconostasis.

Lion Dancers

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Colorful Lion Dancers from UCLA’s Jade Lotus Lion Dance Troupe

Martine and sat on a ledge in the Maguire Gardens by the west entrance to the Los Angeles Central Library. At 11 am two pairs of lion dancers entered and performed a vigorous dance to open this year’s AAPI Joy: Voices, Then & Now. This is a celebration by various local Asian and Pacific Islander groups of their cultural heritage and the experience of living in Southern California.

After the dancers left, I notices the inscription in Latin above the west entrance: ET QUASI CURSORES VITAI LAMPADA TRADUNT. After doing a little digging, I found the quote comes from Book 2 of the De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) by Lucretius and, translated, means “and like runners, they pass on the torch of life.” Very appropriate.

We had attended the AAPI Joy event last year and were happy to find there were even more events scattered across the library premises this year. We attended four of them:

  • The lion dancers
  • Book awards to Filipino-American authors receiving the Carlos Bulosan Book Club awards
  • A Filipino dance troupe called Kayamanan Ng Lahi performing dances from Mindanao
  • The Koto and Nihon Buyo group playing popular Japanese koto music accompanied by dancers

I like the special events put on by the Central Library. Over the last eight years, the library has become a major factor in my life—thanks largely to the opening of the Exposition Line (the E train) on L.A.’s Metro Rail. It has been an unfailing source of great books, an ever-present help to my psyche thanks to the Thursday Mindful Meditation sessions, and a provider of entertainment at their luxurious Mark Taper Auditorium.

My trips to the library downtown are now one of the highlights of my life.

Chichicastenango

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Food Vendor at Sunday Market in Chichicastenango

One of the best meals I ate in my 2019 visit to Guatemala was breakfast at a comedor in the huge marketplace at Chichicastenango. The Maya ladies dished out simple peasant food with eggs, beans, and tortillas, but it was filling and delicious.

At first, I was leery about eating at public marketplaces. But then, after time, I realized that the hard-working women were more motivates to cook good safely prepared food than many hirelings at restaurants. I don’t recall ever having any gourmet food in Guatemala, but what I had was most satisfying.

I spent two nights in Chichicastenango, and I was tired after climbing Turk’aj Hill to visit Pascual Abaj, an idol to whom sacrifices are made by the local Maya shamans. It was quite a hike, and I was already at high altitude (1965 meters or 6,447 feet) to start with.

The Maya Idol Pascual Abaj

I remember wanting to visit the local cemetery after I got down from the hill, but by that time I was totally exhausted. So I had to be contented with a long shot:

View of the Maya Cemetery at Chichicastenango

I wonder if today I could take a trip today as exhausting as my three weeks in Guatemala and Honduras in 2019.

Man of the West

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Count Agoston Haraszthy (1812-1869)

The history of the American West is full of restless and heroic figures. One such was a Hungarian count who, among other things, founded the California wine industry when he established Buena Vista Wineries in 1856. He was also sheriff and U.S. Marshal in San Diego and the first U.S. assayer of rare metals. His ending was a tragic one: He disappeared in Nicaragua, where he was active in starting a rum distillery business. Rumors were that he was dragged under by an alligator.

Today Martine and I attended the Majalis Fesztival at the Grace Hungarian Reformed Church in the San Fernando Valley. There I met up with an acquaintance who is active in the Karpatok Hungarian Dance Ensemble. He told me that they were developing a song and dance concert celebrating the life of Agoston Haraszthy.

This afternoon, they previewed one of the numbers in costume:

The Dancer in the Top Hat Plays Haraszthy

I had known a few things about Haraszthy going back to the early 1970s when I fancied myself a wine connoisseur. But, curiously, in time I became more interested in rum, like the Hungarian count. I guess I just have to stay away from Nicaragua and Alligators.

Mob Scene at the Bookfest

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The Festival of Books One Hour Before Opening Time

It is six days now since I attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which was held at the University of Southern California (USC) campus. By opening time at 10 AM, there were tens of thousands of people in evidence, many of them walking their dogs or pulling wagons stuffed with their progeny. There were even several people who thought I was the late actor Wilford Brimley brought back to life.

Originally, I had intended to visit the Festival on both Saturday and Sunday. After Saturday’s crowd, however, I thought I would spend Sunday far from any mob scenes. It was so bad that I could not see the books I wanted to see from the booths sponsored by such vendors as Vroman’s Books, the Kinokuniya Bookstore, and Book Soup. Those booths actually had lines of people waiting to see what was on sale.

Ever the skeptic, I could not believe that most of these people ever read any book worth reading. Most of the books that people had in their hands were of no appreciable literary quality.

In the end, I wound up spending most of my time at Small World Books’s Poetry Pavilion. A good thing, too! It was there I met Persian poet and translator Sholeh Wolpé, whose rendering of Farid-Ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds I eagerly devoured this last week and reviewed for Goodreads.Com.

One effect of listening to all those poets read their work (three per hour) has led me to include more poetry in my reading. I used to be all for prose, but now I begin to realize that poetry is a better way of expressing anything. Not that it’s easy to read poetry, but it is in the end likely to prove itself more rewarding.

Hot and Not So Hot

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What Purports To Be Mexican Food at Tito’s Tacos

I’ve come a long way since my teen years when I was afraid of tasting my Mom’s home-made lecsó, which was made with rice and Hungarian banana peppers, some of which were fiercely hot. Now, most of what I eat is seasoned with chiles. Today I finished up my Spanish Rice, made with fire-roasted hatch chiles and dry Chiles Japoneses. This morning, I had home=made quesadillas with Mexican jalapeños en escabeche.

Yesterday I dropped in for lunch at a popular Culver City restaurant called Tito’s Tacos in Culver City. I suddenly realized that I had come a long way from my early days. The two hard shell tacos tasted like unseasoned hamburger with a bit of shredded lettuce. Where were the chiles? Nowhere, to be exact. There weren’t even any bowls of pickled jalapeños to spice things up.

In the space of half a century I have morphed into a chile-head. Interestingly, my brother Dan is one as well. I remember going with him to a farmers’ market in Templeton, California and being offered a sample of olives stuffed with habañero chiles, which, as you may know, are probably the hottest chiles in common use, except for special purpose lethal items like the Carolina Reaper.The man offering the stuffed olives expected us to crumple with flames coming out our orifices. When Dan and I looked at each other and expressed approval, we asked for another sample—to the consternation of the seller.

Few of the people I know are able to match me on the Scoville Scale, where I am quite comfortable at tyhe 100,000 Scoville heat units level. For a look at the Scoville scale, check out Wikipedia.

Tulip Mania

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Tulips in Bloom at Descanso Gardens

This was absolutely the best time to visit Descanso Gardens in La Cañada-Flintridge: The tulips, lilacs, and camellias were all in bloom. Of the three, tulips are my favorites, followed by lilacs—mostly for their scent.

For this year, the tulip plantings were nowhere near as intensive as in previous years. One thing I noticed that was different was that the tulip garden area had cards indicating that certain plantings were in memory of some person known to the donor. My guess is that there weren’t as many donors, or volunteers, or employees as the Gardens management anticipated. Or whatever.

Still, what was there was indescribably beautiful. I spent an hour sitting on a bench in the shade just staring at the tulips or reading a book of Tibetan Buddhist teachings by Pema Chödrön. It was peaceful and sublime—even though there were visitors by the thousands to the Garden this afternoon.

Tulips are interesting to me not only because of their looks, but because there was a time almost 400 years ago when they impacted the economic history of Europe. I am talking about the tulip mania that gripped the Netherlands. According to Wikipedia, “At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, certain tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan.” To this day, the term “tulip mania” is associated with an economic bubble that is not linked in any way to the actual intrinsic value of the item traded.

It also has an interesting footnote in literature. In 1850, Alexandre Dumas Père published a novel about the 17th century Dutch tulip fever entitled The Black Tulip. It is the fascinating story of a Dutchman who attempts to develop a black tulip during the period.

Is This Spring, Really?

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Commemorating the First Day of Spring

Spring in Southern California is not as distinctive a season as it is back east, where it is associated with an end to snow and slush. All this week, the temperature has been near 100° Fahrenheit (37° Celsius), even near the beach. Further inland, heat records were broken with dismaying regularity.

The one distinctive spring weather pattern is associated with the terms “Marine Layer” and ”June Gloom.” The wind comes from the ocean and blows clouds inland. Tourists visiting Southern California in the spring always say that they always heard the sun is always shining here. In fact it is, but between the sun and the ground there are clouds and the weather tends to be cool.

I say “tends” because over the past few years, the pattern has been changing. There have been tropical heat waves in the winter, rain falling earlier and later than usual, and even an occasional cold snap. I have no idea where the weather is tending, whether California will become even more desert-like, or whether the rainy season will result in a wetter climate.

It’s always quite beautiful when we’ve had a good rainy season. The California Poppy Preserve in the Antelope Valley becomes full of wildfires. Even the Mohave Desert can appear to be carpeted with tiny, but utterly lovely wildflowers.

But then, all these climactic weather megatrends will not be clear until long after I am gone. All I know is that the weather is very different from when I first moved here in 1966. Will the San Andreas or Cascadia fault result in massive earthquakes? Will the Central Valley be flooded? Or will water become increasingly scarce and make the big cities of California unlivable? (My bet is on the latter.)