Always a Train

Elizabeth Cotten.

I have her story in my mind. A story about her. It might be true. It might not be. She is a real person. Was one anyway. You can see how real she is in the photo above. Photos don't never lie. So she definitely had a story. I'm just saying that I might have confused myself by borrowing a few different parts from other people's stories and then brought those pieces together into one story and then gone and attached all of that to her. That is certainly something I've done before.

Make It Stop!

Time for a rant. It's been a while. I'll get back to the more lyrical stuff in a minute, but today I’m gonna get my Grumpy Old Jewish Man on.

First let me identify my target: Food Bloggers.

So Food Bloggers are those clowns that maintain personal sites that cover things like:

• over pictorialised restaurant reviews, complete with contrived metaphors and over anxious emotional descriptors;
• essays that unnecessarily (and failingly) attempt to use the depth of narrative and style required for a first hand account of a Spanish Civil War battle for a recounting of a Wednesday night spent following Grandma's chocolate cake recipe;
• breathless stories of some food-stuff that an old sorority sister found in a tiny store with the tag 'Gourmet' or 'Artisanal' or 'Overpriced Nonsense' plastered across it;
• and other vapid topics and posts that, to be frank, I just couldn't be bothered to Google, check and then describe to you.

Of Paragraphs and Choices

The Fork in the Road.

We've all been there. Several times. Maybe you're not out on The Road as often or much as I, but you've certainly seen a Fork or two. Even if your Google Maps works better than mine and you felt you thought you knew what was coming over the next rise, you still have to take and make decisions on whether to turn right or left. Most often I only realise that I had come up to a Fork after the fact. This is when a route I take perhaps doesn't work out as I expected it to and after mentally retracing my steps, I become aware of the singular, fateful choice that is that one 'wrong-turn'.

But there are times when I know I'm facing a Fork at the very moment I come up to it. It is so clear, that in my mind I see it as a real scene. I am wearing a faded brown suit and an emerald green button-up-vest that are both laced with thick markings of dust that have risen up off the road and clung to the parts of the material that are most moist with sweat. My right shoulder is slumped down due the stiff, red leather suitcase that hangs from my right hand. Across my left forearm and cradled into my stomach, lies a bouquet of wildflowers, wrapped in a light, tracing paper. I don't know exactly how long I’ve been carrying this spirited melange of purples, yellows and whites and neither do I know whom they are meant for, but they seem as fresh and as lively as the ones still growing and attached to the ground around my feet.

Um, What's Your Number

If you could quote Tex Perkins, Gillian Welch and Lester Bangs. If you could recite the entire lyrics to 'Isis'. If you read Doctor Gonzo's letters. If you got the desert in your toenails and hid the speed inside your shoes. If you had wet hair, black trousers and smooth, bare heels. If you cooked linguine with saffron and cream and fresh crab and diced sea bass and barely sauteed scallops. If you ate New York Strip steak, that had been brutally char-grilled just past rare.

If you danced for me and let me sing for you. If you sat, stayed and cheered for a fourth quarter comeback. If you had seen Melbourne in the rain, Nafplio in the chill and Prague in the snow – and you still wanted more. If you have dug a hole in the sand, filled it with hunks of dried Red Gum wood and lit a searing, midnight bonfire, that made nearly as much noise as the crashing surf in the distance. If country music had saved your life.

They Call It Black Friday, But Tuesday's Just As Bad

Coming back up Wilshire, as we slowly made our way out of Santa Monica and towards Brentwood,

both of our easy strolls gave way to pronounced limps. We had started our walk back at 3^rd street and were now approaching the 20's. The Virginian wasn't equipped with the right footwear. That was her excuse. Mine had more to do with the same 'old before my time' afflictions that come and go like the weather over the bay. Whatever it was, we both needed a break. A little pit-stop from the exercise.

Around where we were, Wilshire opens out into a wide, multi-lane carriageway, buffered on each side by stubby commercial spaces. It has the feel of those wide, winding highways that accountants ride through as they make their way home after work, past outer suburbia and on towards the outer, outer suburbia of their pre-fab McMansion houses. The white noise of never ending cruising steel, crunching changing gears and screeching brake-pads is often accompanied by a visual palate of blacks, greys, charcoals and browns. All over the world, such exact roads exist and on their sidewalks, as this all rushes past you, one tends to feel lonely and silent.

Red and Yellow

I'm listening to a lot of Tom Waits lately. And Tex Perkins. It has been almost exclusively the two of them on the iPod. They both have more than enough stuff out there to keep me occupied for endless afternoon walks through the rolling and sweeping - yet concise and compact – silent , side-street opulence of Hancock Park. Both of their recorded works cover an almost unbelievable variety of styles and genres.

Waits started off with a traditional wounded, boozy, New Orleans feel and then progressed towards the more loose and avant-garde - sounding something like a giant, red circus tent with straw flung across the ground, silver shining stars stuck to the roof and the smell of whiskey mixed with elephant dung hanging about your ears. Tex's sound started off more experimental, bawdy and bourbony and has slowly made it's way to traditional and nontraditional Country, with little pit-stops for disco, ladyboys, drum machines and heroin-addled-bluesy-funk.

Feels Like I've Written Before

I've probably written about some of this stuff before.

I wrote another post about breakfast a while back. I write a lot about breakfast. Not only on this blog, but on the pages of other notebooks. Breakfast and Trains. I write a lot about breakfast and trains.

No trains around here lately. I’d love one, though. Sleek, low slung, high-speed carriage, high-backed red chairs with fold down armrests and scattered with high-nervous company. I would love to bunch up into a corner, sitting with my back towards to driver's seat and my head resting on the big window. My earphones plugged in, I’d pump up as much Ella as I could find and just stare, watching the outside go by as I held as still as possible. Hold my ground, whilst everything else rushes past and away.

Hasn't been that much Breakfast either. I’m eating. I’m having an early first bit of something, but not that breakfast 'thing'. That early morning salvation that is a dance of compassion, care and activity hasn't been around me for a while now. Until this morning. This morning was one of the greats. One I will remember for a while to come.

Of Topography

Tallow Beach. 

The locals call it 'The Back Beach”. It runs from south under The Byron Bay Lighthouse, past Suffolk Park and ending down at Broken Head. How long that stretch is I couldn't tell you. I suppose I could look it up, but I’d rather not. I want to write about my memories of the beach, not of an image that is adulterated by another's perspectives. You can look it up, if you like. If you need to know. It's a long way. It runs a long way.

Insomnia Ain't No Kind Of Lady

Sleep comes hard now in Hollywood. Similar to before, but even harder now. Last time I was here, I converted that lack of sleep into early mornings for exercise. The fresh air – still crisp before the sun had time to take full effect - and the silent green sidestreets, would be followed by the muggy, filled air of a clanging gym. All done, showered and completed from with plenty of room to spare before a full mid-morning breakfast. Later, at night, I’d be served a heavy dose of drowsiness well before midnight. I'd finish work and almost run home to collapse into bed, whilst begging whomever takes such requests, for even thirty minutes more than four hours sleep. But that was before. That was last time.

Now sleep comes even harder than that in Hollywood.

Sure There Is

I've woken up thinking of live music gigs I've been too. Specifically, I’m trying to think of which ones were the best. I'm not sure why that is. It could have something to do with what I was listening to as I walked around Hollywood last night. Perhaps. I think there is probably another reason. I’m sure there is.

I consider myself lucky. I've managed to be at quite a few truly great gigs. That is lucky, for I don't go to that many. I’m held back by knowing that on occasion, I will have certain 'issues' with large crowds. It's easier to just avoid them and so, consequently I end up avoiding many gigs. There's a word for that sort of thing and you'll probably want to fling it at me. It's actually a little more complex than that and like so many of the quirks of my days, it involves a train in one way or another. I'm fascinated by trains and trains seem to be fascinated by me too. (Mostly it's Freight Trains of old and lore that have done me in, but in this instance it was the fault of a more modern, underground one.)

Bessie

“Bessie was more than just a friend of mine; We shared the good times and the bad”

That's a lyric from The Band song 'Bessie Smith'. It is an ode to the grand old dame of all blues singers. Bessie had long passed away before any of those boys were born and none of them ever got to actually meet her. They're singing about a connection they felt to her through her records. Not just a simple connection of recognition or empathy, but a connection of more than friendship. A bond, that was a reciprocated, circular, personal exchange. One that rose above convenience or ease and was strong and present in both the good times and the bad.

What a great bond to have. To know that because she had been there on both sides of the coin before, she would certainly be there again. She wouldn't change with the winds of time or the cast of a glance, because she was frozen in a moment on those records. They could put on 'Careless Love' and the emotion and the caution and the regret and the pain would sound the very same as it always did and leave them exactly desperate and hopeful. Bessie had been there. You could hear it in her wail. Bessie had probably been there much worse.

A Note and a Warning

This here post is an exercise.

I want to be a writer. I mean - A Writer. There's a difference.

See, anyone can write. Every monkey and his cousin has a blog or a tumblr or fancies their Facebook status update as concise, social decelerations. There is Twitter which is for those that are trigger happy with quickly constructed, oblique aphorisms, whilst hundreds of literary journal take submissions from those who take the time edit and re-edit. People all over the world, in all languages, write every day and they all do it for different reasons.

My reason? As I said, I want to be A Writer.

Laundry

“If all I had left was ten dollars, I’d spend it all on a service laundry.”



Some of my most intimate memories involve Laundry. In fact, many of them do. This sounds like an odd declaration – even in the context of other declarations made on this blog – so let me explain a little:

To you, the word 'intimate' may suggest moments shared between people. Moments of closeness experienced, understood and remembered only by them. To me, in this instance, 'intimate' means private, alone, quiet and personal. Laundry means all of this in my memories.

Of Rain

I miss the rain. I know it rained today, but that wasn't what I wanted - what I miss.

It was heavy for a while out there. I stood inside a street-level, glass-wrapped lobby off Union Square and watched it. Yeah it was heavy and it was hard. For a while, it scared away the oversized, primary-coloured golf umbrellas. You know you're dealing with something above a patter when the rain is too much for even those over-protected folk to withstand. I felt secure, like a hedge-funder with a full bank acccount in a shrinking cash economy. I felt above and safe and beyond the deluge. And not only because I was dry and inside, but because I was dry and inside a cinema. Not any cinema, but one I have used before, last time I'd lived here. One with many screens over two levels and a stairway connecting them that you can climb or descend unsupervised and flow on for free from movie to movie. You can keep that Movie Marathon going from morning to midnight if you know how to read the program right. And I can read that shit better than Bukowski could read a formguide down at the track.

Of Spray Paint, Cake and Change

So, there is this wall down on Fairfax. It runs along the side of a vacant lot. It is covered in various, unrelated, spray-painted images and letterings, that make up one whole body of work. The list of folk responsible for these individual pieces, reads like a who's who of local and international Street Artists.

The other day 'they' partially buffed that wall. There is a whole story to who 'they' are and what 'they' did and what may now happen to 'they'. It's actually quite interesting. But that's not the story I wanna tell today. So I won't. It's really just an introduction to the one I do wanna tell.