Dorothea Lange
Posted: August 29, 2017 Filed under: photography, the California Condition Leave a comment
Three of the four Arnold children. The oldest boy earned the money to buy his bicycle. Western Washington, Thurston County, Michigan Hill.
Let’s look
Child living in Oklahoma City shack town
at a sample
Cotton picker, southern San Joaquin Valley
of the
Woman in pea picker’s camp. California. “I seen our corn dry up and blow over the fence back there in Oklahoma”
Children of migratory Mexican field workers. The older one helps tie carrots in the field. Coachella Valley, California
Dorothea Lange photos
Pregnant migrant woman living in California squatter camp. Kern County
Japanese mother and daughter, agricultural workers near Guadalupe, California
Mexican girl who picks peas for the eastern market. Imperial Valley, California
Children of migratory workers, hauling water, American River camp, San Joaquin Valley, California
Trouble at the Allah-Las concert !
Posted: August 24, 2017 Filed under: music, the California Condition Leave a commentIn Rotterdam, a concert cancelled after Spanish police warn Dutch police about a possible bomb plot.
I wonder what the terrorists don’t like about this band.
The name?
Colin Drury of The Guardian, Aug. 2016, reports:
They chose to use Allah – Arabic for god – because they wanted something “holy sounding”. But they say they never realised some might interpret it as trivialising or mocking their religious beliefs. “We get emails from Muslims, here in the US and around the world, saying they’re offended, but that absolutely wasn’t our intention,” says Michaud. “We email back and explain why we chose the name and mainly they understand.”
In Turkey, a show got pulled because the promoter didn’t feel comfortable. “But what’s the alternative?” asks Siadatian. “We’ve had the name so long I don’t think we can change it. That wouldn’t work. We don’t dwell. You know, no regrets.”
What the band do regret is the growing gentrification of hometown LA.
I guess if I stand for anything it’s for a band’s right to call themselves whatever, without anybody getting blowed up over it.
Free speech protections do not equal endorsements. But in the civilized world you can call your band whatever you want.
Don’t know much about the band. I like this song Catamaran. Very cool song.
Cube Houses of Rotterdam by wiki user Hanselpedia
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Almond
Posted: August 13, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition, words Leave a comment
Take a break from your work and the stressful news to learn the etymology of the word almond.
Looked it up because I wondered if it might be Arabic. Not so.
From Greek amygdalos, a word of unknown origin, perhaps from Semitic.
Thanks Online Etymology Dictionary.
(From the Who Did This? section of Online Etymology Dictionary’s website:
My political ideas have no future and I keep them to myself unless provoked. They tend toward the -isms that begin with anti-anti- and take root among the kind of people who are steamrolled by developments, murdered by revolutions, and forgotten even in footnotes. I deplore politics based on herd and tribe and demonizing of the other, which means most of it. What else? Dogs and I don’t get along. I’m trying to think of qualities that matter to people’s weighting of integrity. I haven’t watched television since 1994. It might have been ’96. I put ketchup on hot dogs and mustard on french fries. When I played World of Warcraft I found I generally chose a rogue. Human. Female.
And:
Etymonline is a can-opener
Couldn’t agree more.)
The same root word is used to name the amygdala in your brain.
We don’t wade into neuroscience here on Helytimes. Using the brain to study itself feels grotesque. It’s too overwhelming, my brain refuses to learn about itself. (Only just learned there are two amygdala, for instance). And charts like this agitate because I suspect they are probably crazy oversimplifications to the point of being meaningless?
But some interesting bits from the Wiki page on amygdala:
Amygdala volume correlates positively with both the size (the number of contacts a person has) and the complexity (the number of different groups to which a person belongs) of social networks.[59][60] Individuals with larger amygdalae had larger and more complex social networks. They were also better able to make accurate social judgments about other persons’ faces.[61]
And:
There are cases of human patients with focal bilateral amygdala lesions, due to the rare genetic condition Urbach-Wiethe disease.[67][68]
And:
The amygdala appears to play a role in binge drinking, being damaged by repeated episodes of intoxication and withdrawal.[70] Alcoholism is associated with dampened activation in brain networks responsible for emotional processing[clarification needed], including the amygdala.[71]
The story about Obama eating seven almonds a night was so perfect – that is a good number of almonds to eat! Obama’s explanation of it I found illuminating:
“Well, this is an example of the weird way that the press works,” Obama said. “So Michelle and Sam Kass, who was our chef here, one night they were talking about me and teasing me about how disciplined I was, that I didn’t have potato chips or I didn’t have a piece of cake. And this is when Michelle said, ‘Yes, and he just has seven almonds. That’s it.’ To really drive home the point that I needed to loosen up a little bit. And Sam relayed this joke to The New York Times in the article and somehow it was relayed as if I was counting out … the seven almonds.”
source
Almonds. Enjoy them.
Previous Helytimes coverage of almonds.
How big are the UK and Ireland compared to California?
Posted: August 7, 2017 Filed under: Ireland, the California Condition 2 Comments
The UK: 65.64 million people. 93,629 square miles.
California: 39.25 million people. 163,996 square miles.
Ireland: 4.773 million people. 32,595 square miles.
In 1841 the population of Ireland (just counting what’s now the Republic, not the whole island) was 6.53 million.
abandoned house near Killary photoed by Helytimes
Ireland is like a ghost town.
Today’s radical policy suggestion:
Ireland should take in two million refugees. Much as the world once took them in. It’s time to return the favor. Two million refugees would return the nation to pre-1841 population.
Today’s question:
Are there other countries where the population is significantly smaller today than it was around 1840?
(maps via the great site Overlap Maps which is run by Sunflower Education, a publisher of books for homeschoolers)
Old Dale, CA
Posted: August 3, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
The people who populated this remote mining region were tougher than a tortoise shell and twice as dusty. To describe some of these hard scrabble miners as rugged individualists is like describing the Coen brothers as a couple of kids with cameras.
The miners defined the term colorful character, some of whom would made a cholla cactus seem cuddly by comparison.
Little is left but a grave
By April 1896, Dale had two small mills and an arrastra to process ore, a general store, an assayer’s office, a blacksmith shop, a saloon and a house of ill repute.
No structures remain in any of the settlements today. Everything has been salvaged, stolen, vandalized or burned to nothing but ash piles and rusty nails. Roofless adobe walls have melted back into the sands from which they rose.
Blow sand that had covered the arrastra at Old Dale has recently been excavated. Contrary to being pleased by the amateur archeological work, Wharff is wary, concerned that the people who did the digging may return to unearth the stones, looking for any traces of stray gold that may be left below the rock floor of the historical structure.
Lippincott’s Pronouncing Gazeteer of the World
Posted: July 25, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
from
a book no home should be without
Root ecosystem, Lauren Elizabeth!
Posted: July 25, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
Ansel in Playboy
Posted: July 20, 2017 Filed under: art history, photography, the American West, the California Condition Leave a comment
I’ll explain it this way: Both William Henry Jackson and Edward Weston photographed the American West extensively. But in my opinion, only Weston’s photographs qualify as art. Jackson, for all his devotion to the subject, was recording the scene. Weston, on the other hand, was actually creating something new. In his work, subject is of secondary importance to the total photograph. Similarly, while the landscapes that I have photographed in Yosemite are recognized by most people and, of course, the subject is an important part of the pictures, they are not “realistic.” Instead, they are an imprint of my visualization. All of my pictures are optically very accurate–I use pretty good lenses–but they are quite unrealistic in terms of values. A more realistic simple snapshot captures the image but misses everything else. I want a picture to reflect not only the forms but what I had seen and felt at the moment of exposure.
Playboy: Give us an example.Adams: My Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico has the emotion and the feeling that the experience of seeing the actual moonrise created in me, but it is not at all realistic. Merely clicking the camera and making a simple print from the negative would have created a wholly different–and ordinary–photograph. People have asked me why the sky is so dark, thinking exactly in terms of the literal. But the dark sky is how it felt.
When photographer Alfred Stieglitz was asked by some skeptic, rather scornfully, “How do you make a creative photograph?” he answered, “I go out into the world with my camera and come across something that excites me emotionally, spiritually or aesthetically. I see the image in my mind’s eye. I make the photograph and print it as the equivalent of what I saw and felt.” That describes it well. What he called seeing in the mind’s eye, I call visualization. In my mind’s eye, I am visualizing how a particular revelation of sight and feeling will appear on a print. If I am looking at you, I can continue to see you as a person, but I am also in the habit of shifting from that consciously dimensional presence to a photograph, relating you in your surroundings to an image in my mind. If what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense and also an ability that comes from a lot of practice. Some people never can get it.
Playboy: When did you know you could accomplish it?Adams: I had my first visualization while photographing Half Dome in Yosemite in 1927. It was a remarkable experience. After a long day with my camera, I had only two photographic plates left. I found myself staring at Half Dome, facing the monolith, seeing and feeling things that only the photograph itself can tell you. I took the first exposure and, somehow, I knew it was inadequate. It did not capture what I was feeling. It was not going to reflect the tremendous experience. Then, to use Stieglitz’ expression, I saw in my mind’s eye what the picture should look like and I realized how I must get it. I put on a red filter and figured out the exposure correctly, and I succeeded! When I made the prints, it proved my concept was correct. The first exposure came out just all right. It was a good photograph, but it in no way had the spirit and excitement I had felt. The second was Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, which speaks for itself.
More:
They were the ones Weston called the fuzzy-wuzzies. They would go out into the street and find some old bum with a matted beard, and they’d get a tablet of Braille and make the old man put his fingers on the Braille. They would place him in an old chair, looking up through a cloud of cigarette smoke that was illuminated by a spotlight. The title would be Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. That must have been done a thousand times. There were also slimy nudes.
I am an Ansel Democrat:
Playboy: You said that earlier. We assumed you were speaking rhetorically. Weren’t you?Adams: Definitely not. We are on a disaster course. A revolution may happen first; and, of course, that may be a disaster anyway. I don’t say it would be a Soviet revolution, but it could very well result in a different order of society. It could be a socialist setup that might work for a while. We don’t know. The point is, I think there may be a revolution if there is not greater equality given to all citizens. We have consistently considered the employer, especially the large corporations, as the most valuable part of the American society. We have consistently overlooked the enormous importance of the farmer, the technician, the educator, the artist, the laborer. I’m not calling for a revolution; I’m calling for greater equality to all citizens. If that doesn’t happen, something will.You see, I believe in a Federalism under which you would pay your taxes to a properly elected and conducted central Government that would, in turn, provide essential services–which would include medical care and other essentials–to the population. I do think there is a basic obligation for everyone to make his maximum contribution to society, but we talk about opportunity for everyone, and the fact is that it is perfectly obvious that equal opportunity does not exist. It’s about time we woke to that fact and clarified the whole social-political structure. Or we’ll be awakened.Remember, ten percent unemployment, no matter how high that is, is an average. There are places and segments of the population with much higher unemployment. People will not continue to tolerate those conditions. What we need is a new set of political commandments that call to attention some of the basic provisions of the Constitution that are often overlooked by our contemporary leaders. There are inalienable rights that are supposed to be guaranteed. It is absolutely criminal that our Government has consistently supported rightist governments that deny citizens’ rights while being paranoid about any liberal concept, which is the concept upon which our country was founded. But, remember, it took a revolution here.
And finally, his martini recipe:
Playboy: While we’re on the subject, that is some strong martini we’ve sampled. Will you share your recipe with us?Adams: The martini I am drinking now is simply diluted–that way, I can have several. But the ones you’re sipping come from a Hotel Sonesta bartender in Cambridge. You take a good-sized glass and fill it with fine vermouth. Then you marinate some big lemon peels in there for days. As the vermouth evaporates or is used up, replenish it. All you need is a glass, ice, vodka and a lemon peel. Rub the lemon peel around the rim of the glass, drop it in, and you have a very dry martini.
Luckie
Posted: July 17, 2017 Filed under: desert, the California Condition Leave a comment
If you’re like me you saw this and wondered who Luckie Park is named after
I didn’t have to look far:
“This Luckie Reilly may be a relation,” I thought. Sure enough:
It’s this Dr. Luckie that the park is named after. Here’s some good info about him in the Morongo Basin Historical Society’s newsletter:
There’s a mural of him:
That’s from Google Earth. Better picture at Action 29 Palms – The Mural People.
I wonder if this James Luckie was the son or grandson of James Buckner Luckie, who was a doctor with the Army of East Tennessee in the Civil War, and performed one of the first ever triple amputations. More info and (warning) a photo on this German language (?) wikipedia page.
Luckie Reilly sounds great. From a 2006 article about her, “10 Things To Know About Luckie Reilly,” in the Hi-Desert Star in 2006:
10. Susan continues to weigh in on local land-use issues, sometimes speaking her mind at City Council meetings and through letters to the editor. “I’ve been an activist for years,’ she says. “I’ve opposed power plants, polluting industries and waste dumps in the desert. You can’t just sit back and watch things go to heck!”
Melfax
Posted: June 24, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
The street art scene in my neighborhood is fantastic.
Meanwhile, out in the desert
Posted: April 26, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
The top story in both the Hi-Desert Star and The Desert Trail is the removal of 1,100 desert tortoises from the Marine Corps base to safer lands.
Was Defense Secretary Mattis personally briefed on the operation?
It may seem silly but the story made me feel good.
find happy homes guys.
All I Gotta Do Is Act Naturally
Posted: April 24, 2017 Filed under: actors, the California Condition Leave a commentWhen I first got to California a real curiosity was Bakersfield and the Bakersfield Sound.
from wiki’s article on the Kern River Oilfield. Photo by Antantrus
What the hell was going on up there in Bakersfield? There were four Basque restaurants in town.
Buck Owens was the king of the Bakersfield sound, he had the Crystal Palace. He died before I got to see him. From Wiki:
The Los Angeles Times interviewed longtime Owens spokesman (and Buckaroos keyboard player) Jim Shaw, who said Owens “had come to the club early and had a chicken fried steak dinner and bragged that it’s his favorite meal.”
bragged?
Afterward, Owens told band members that he wasn’t feeling well and was going to skip that night’s performance. Shaw said a group of fans introduced themselves while Owens was preparing to drive home; when they told him that they had traveled from Oregon to hear him perform, Owens changed his mind and took the stage anyway.
Shaw recalled Owens telling the audience, “If somebody’s come all that way, I’m gonna do the show and give it my best shot. I might groan and squeak, but I’ll see what I can do.” Shaw added, “So, he had his favorite meal, played a show and died in his sleep. We thought, that’s not too bad.”
The alpha song of the Bakersfield sound has to be Act Naturally. The Beatles had Ringo sing it:
I’ve probably listened to the Buck Owens version between 50 and 100 times. It continues to reveal itself. How about the the paradox of acting naturally.
Only very very good actors are capable of truly acting naturally.
Otani Oniji II as Yakko Edobei in the Play “Koinyabo Somewake Tazuna”
Saraku, Toshusai (worked 1794-1795)
Polychrome woodblock print with mica ground
h. 15 in. w. 9-7/8 in.
from the Met.
Did Otani Onjii act naturally?
Whole acting schools are devoted to teaching people how to act naturally.
Why do people have so much trouble acting naturally?
If you’re in Bakersfield get an ice cream sundae at Dewar’s.
Will and Ariel Durant
Posted: April 22, 2017 Filed under: heroes, history, the California Condition Leave a comment
One of the local branches of the LA Public Library, the one on Sunset across from Wendy’s, is named after Will and Ariel Durant.
David Brooks grows wistful as he considers the Will and Ariel Durant project:
Between 1935 and 1975, Will and Ariel Durant published a series of volumes that together were known as “The Story of Civilization.” They basically told human history (mostly Western history) as an accumulation of great ideas and innovations, from the Egyptians, through Athens, Magna Carta, the Age of Faith, the Renaissance and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The series was phenomenally successful, selling over two million copies.
I’ve taken a look at the first volume of the series,
and was astounded, amused, and delighted by what I found there. Here’s an example.
When Will met Ariel Durant, her name was Ida, she was fourteen, and she was his student.
She was 15 at her marriage on Oct. 31, 1913, and came to the ceremony with her roller skates slung over her shoulder. Her husband was just about to turn 28. He called her Ariel, after the the imp in Shakespeare’s ”The Tempest,” and she later had her name legally changed.
(from Will’s NYT obituary). In Our Oriental Civilization, Will makes the case for himself:
It’s pretty funny that we named the library after a pair of lovers whose romance would get the man arrested today.
On the other hand, that’s the kind of paradox of historical and civilizational change that Will Durant took so much joy in teaching about.
More from the NYT:
Dr. Durant consistently took a generally optimistic view of civilization, despite a growing belief that ”the world situation is all fouled up.”
”Civilization is a stream with banks,” he said in his precise voice. ”The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues.
”The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.”
Will and Ariel, from Wikipedia:
TAKE: vote yes on WGA strike authorization
Posted: April 18, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, the California Condition Leave a comment
The Writers’ Guild is weird. For one thing, some of the members are owners or bosses. Writers who become showrunners and share in the profits of a show can have an owner’s interest. Another: writers have agents who negotiate for them.
Some writers make lots and lots of money. Others are unemployed, or at least unemployed as writers. It’s not really a union, it’s a guild, like a medieval guild, an association of craftspeople who work a certain trade.
Why is Staalmesters translated as “Syndics”? Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild. The Sampling Officials sounds cooler.
Or maybe something like London’s livery companies?:
A writers union going on strike can seem silly when you picture a union like this:
and a strike like this:
I find this on the Post-Bulletin: Steve Martell, Charles Brown, and an unidentified third man stand on the picket line on the morning of August 17, 1985, outside the Hormel Foods plant in Austin, Minnesota. Did Trump steal that style of hat consciously?
and writers like this:
But, if you’re in the Writers Guild, and you’re a Helytimes reader, I think you should vote yes on the strike authorization.
If you’re not in the Writers’ Guild, here are the facts, as I misremember them:
- TV writers are making less and less money but working the same amount of time. As shows have smaller orders of episodes, ten instead of twenty-two, writers are still working the same amount of days, but since many of us get paid per episode, we’re getting paid less for the same or more amount of days working.
- The studios are making enormous profits.*
- The studios sort of owe it to us to maintain our healthcare and pension plans, due to deals that were made over the years, and they’re saying they’re not going to do that.
Like all workers, we’re getting squeezed as much as possible by companies whose mandate is to be as profitable as possible for shareholders.
Workers can and should use every tool they can to fight for as much as they can. Our guild’s leaders are negotiating and have asked us to vote to authorize a strike, so they can bargain as effectively as possible.
Gunawan Kartapranata provided Wikipedia’s photo for the article on Bargaining
That’s pretty much my take. I hope it doesn’t happen. It will be very painful and hurt a lot of people. It shuts down production, which means grips, PAs, electricians, etc. are all out of work too. And actors, lots of whom have really struggled to get a shot and are going to continue to struggle.
I think the studios should just give us what we asked for. Disney is one of the studios we’re negotiating with. They have a market cap of $178 billion. I appreciate that Bob Iger has his strategic challenges with ESPN and so on but it seems wise and reasonable to me to say “fine let’s give the creators of our highly profitable content their not ridiculous demands and continue generating money from some of the world’s most popular entertainment, TV shows and movies.”
During the last strike my dad sent me his book of AFL-CIO songs
If we do go on strike, I think we shouldn’t picket. That was unhelpful. There should be some human shows of solidarity, but daily picketing got to be a weird ritual, some kind of bizarre martyrdom that in the end made us look more ridiculous. I am proud to say I feel like I did my duty, but I preferred my days answering the phones at Strike Headquarters to making small talk with Tom Bergeron while I held a sign outside CBS. Although that was fun too.
We discussed Rap Around. Source.
A dissenting opinion from a writer with always interesting takes:
The idea of a WGA strike in these times, when freedom of expression is a far more fundamental issue than small differences between comparatively large amounts of money, is stunningly tone deaf and offensive.
That’s on a moral level.
On a strategic level, strikes are only effective when one side has both desperation and leverage. The WGA has neither.
I voted for the WGA strike in 2008. I regret it. The tangible benefits to the lives of working writers have never been explained in any relevant or understandable terms. The tangible losses to writers’ lives were painfully clear.
This is a bad idea masquerading as the right thing to do. On every level, it is not.
The issues at stake in the last strike were complex. I thought it was important for writers to get some kind of residual for streaming content. Whether it was necessary or well-executed, I’m not informed enough to answer. There was a layer of silliness to it for sure.
I do feel some energy like “one strike is fine, but two in this short a time is awful much.”
I kind of get that? But: the WGA is sort of the first union down the chain. We’re on the frontier here, that’s why we keep having to fight.
So, that’s my take.
* I saw the number $51 billion thrown around. I have no idea where that came from. Does it include, for instance, Disney’s theme park division? It’s hard to assess how much profit the studios are making. The AMPTP represents over 350 companies. I’m sure some of them are doing terribly!
But, here are some numbers for the bigger companies, from a 2015 Forbes magazine rundown by Natalie Robehmed:
Once the theatrical run of a film is over, studios make money from home video, video on demand, and through syndicating hit TV shows, as 21st Century Fox was able to do with Modern Family. Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox clocked the second highest profit of the publicly traded studios, earning $1.5 billion in 2014. It measured revenue of $10.3 billion, largely from betting big on books that turned into box office hits hits such as Gone Girl and The Fault in Our Stars.
Undeterred by the failed Comcast/Time Warner merger, NBCUniversal outdid itself and recorded its most profitable year ever. The studio notched $711 million in profit on $5 billion in revenue – the second best ratio in Hollywood.
Warner Bros.’ films grossed a collective $4 billion in 2014, but the studio pocketed $1.2 billion in profit from $12.5 billion in revenue. This was up 23% on 2013’s tally. The studio weathered its fair share of flops: Transcendence, Blended and Winter’s Tale all failed to perform. Its pockets were fattened by the last Hobbit movie, plus popcorn cruncher The Lego Movie which has a sequel in the works. The studio is also expanding its $5 billion television business internationally, paying $267 million for production company Eyeworks which operates in 15 countries
etc. There is poor baby Paramount:
The title of least profitable studio goes to the Viacom-owned Paramount. Despite an increase in its films’ performance at the international box office, the filmed entertainment division tallied just $219 million on revenues of $3.7 billion. This was a decrease from 2013, when profit surged thanks to selling distribution rights for Marvel movies to Disney.
Hit me up if you disagree, find factual errors, want to express a contrary view!
Joshua Tree from the air
Posted: April 15, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
from Google Earth. A little closer to the ground:
Campfire cooking
Posted: April 7, 2017 Filed under: food, the California Condition Leave a comment
Something Biblical about roasting lamb chops right on the fire. A true al pastor. Plus it seemed to honor(?) the local fauna:
Of course you need a charcuterie plate.
Working on taking campfire cooking to the next level. HT various campmates for the photos and ideas.
Some notes:
- Foil packeted onions and peppers came out pretty well. More elaborate foil pack meals have been a bust for me. I tried some stew meat / potatoes sitch once, pointless. Keep it simple.
- Wrapping a potato in foil and putting it in the ashes is such a crapshoot. You have to leave it in there for a good hour I believe.
- You always want the cheapest hot dog buns you can find.
- Enjoyed reading these camping experts’ recipes from kayakcritic.net and would like to try Cristina Lash’s cast iron apple cinnamon oatmeal.
Man vs. nature. A tie, in this case.
At Hungry Cat
Posted: April 1, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
© Andrew Stuart source
Ran into a bartender I’ve seen there before who greeted me by saying “Have you seen Logan yet?”
On KUSC
Posted: March 16, 2017 Filed under: music, the California Condition Leave a commentour local classical radio station, the DJ just said (I’m paraphrasing)
if you like the classical music you’re hearing, roll down your windows and share it with your neighbors!
then he said, mild as all hell,
just a suggestion.
KUSC’s website.
Mirga! I swear I won’t forget
Ottensamer ist clarinet bae.
Clarinetist Andreas Ottensamer’s third solo album is dedicated to the Mannheim School: an 18th-century melting pot of musical revolutionary experimentation.
George Bellows
Posted: March 14, 2017 Filed under: art history, New York, the California Condition Leave a comment
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Posted: March 7, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition, writing Leave a comment
Friends, this book is brilliant, hilarious and compelling. I recommend it without reservation.
My galley copy there is banged up because I ripped it in half so I could bring the unfinished half on a trip, and what a delightful companion it was.
Come see me discuss the book with Elif herself at the LA Public Library downtown:
Monday March 20th
7:15pm
Free but get a ticket
Here are some choice excerpts from The Idiot:
Patricia Lockwood highlighted one of my fav parts on Twitter:
Elif some years ago introduced me to the street cats of Istanbul: 
And showed me where to get corn: 
Now, I can return the favor in Los Angeles and YOU can join the fun:
MONDAY MARCH 20
7:15 PM
Mark Taper Auditorium – Central Library
The event is FREE but get a ticket.
Helytimes 
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