2009

2009 is the year the Twin Palms closed in Pasadena. 11 years ago, I had my first unofficial "date" with my partner there. When I read a story in one of my many magazines about a couple that wanted to make Christmas extra special by finding things from their past to give, I thought of the Twin Palms because they were closing at the end of November after almost 16 years in business.

My friend, Pamela, and I went immediately to try and get a memento. The hostess, a young woman, was unsympathetic when I told her that I had my first date 11 years ago with my partner there and could I have a matchbook? They don’t have matchbooks anymore. A menu? No. A second host, a young man, was more sympathetic and disappeared in search of something to give me in the back. Pamela and I felt hopeful while listening to Sunday Jazz, but the young man returned empty handed. I’m sorry. There isn’t anything that I could get.

Dejected, I said, how about a napkin? Can you at least use the Twin Palms stamp on a cocktail napkin? He was enthusiastic and grabbed two napkins from the bar and put a faint imprint with the restaurant’s name on it. The ink was just about dried up.

It’s not what I had hoped, but it did remind me of a special night when the friend that I had known for many years stopped talking to me in the middle of the meal and kept staring at me, and I ate a huge pork chop as we fell in love.

I put the napkins in the Christmas stocking this year along with a photo of me in front of the Twin Palms sign at the entrance that Pamela snapped on her cell phone as we left with the two sad napkins.

New Year 2009 GoOdByE

The end of a decade is infused with meaning. And, it's not just the end of the year, but the end of the past 10 YEARS we're looking at. A lot of space is being fill on the air, in print and on-line about what this last 10 years has meant. What's the best and worst of every category? What does it all mean?

It has been unique in many ways and you can see it reflected best in the arts. Terry Gross recently interviewed singer/songwriter Nellie McKay. McKay's sweet voice doesn't jive with the words of many of her songs and jazzy upbeat music. One song in particular, "Manhattan Avenue" is about her rough childhood in Harlem where pit bulls ripped the throats out of kittens and where she and her mother got mugged in their apartment. But the music is breezy and her voice light. There's a hallucinatory feeling to how Nellie is laughing and singing gaily about sad and disconcerting events. It's a disconnect that I think epidomizes the end of the lying-to-your face cynicism of the Bush years and the need to look at the tragedies of our decade, especially 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. We need to see it but we don't want to.

I'm trying to find a way to describe the sweetness that pulls you in, the mask, that is pulled away to reveal the darkness underneath. There's a sickness there, but it's too much to take in so we cover up with flavored cough syrup.

It's what artist Kara Walker achieved brilliantly in the late '90s with her antebellum silhouettes of horrors committed to slaves depicted in the refined and delicate 18th century art form. At first glance, Walker's art looks decorative and pretty. It's intricate and appealing. Then you get closer and see that the silhouettes are of slaves being raped and young white children abusing already abused black women. Walker was on the cutting edge, but I'll consider her part of this decade because of the influence her art had and still has.

There's also the art of Takashi Murakami. His super sweet large eyed anime creatures reveal disturbing and often horrifying realities. Sometimes it's purely whimsical, but sometimes it's a dream or fantasy that turns into a nightmare. There is a digital installation at the MOCA in Japan Town/downtown LA that beautifully shows this transition. It's a chiho aoshima piece that starts with large leaves and flowers, lovely brightly colored crickets and non-threatening creatures move, grow, evolve. There are undulating alive buildings with faces and blinking lights swaying in the background. Happy commerce in the background of changing nature. Slowly, things turn dark and the cute creatures turn into severed heads of once-cute girls spiked on the same plants we admired earlier.

What should we call this? There must already be a name for it.

A phrase just popped into my head: "Is that blood?"

Brr dyslexic

I have to say that being dyslexic is a drag sometimes. I don't know how to sell "brr" and had to stop writing a post in order to look it up on the internet. But, the good news is WE HAVE THE INTERNET and I can spend the couple of seconds it takes to look up anything that I need to spell. The drag part is that it's all the time.

What I started to write about was LA in winter. It can be 55 degrees and feel warm on one day and 55 degrees and be chilly on another. Today it's chilly. I even came back from walking my dog to change my jacket to a coat. I'm not complaining about a cold 55 degrees because it feels wonderful as long as you're wearing the proper clothes.