Literary smackdown: who's the winner?

VS.

Cooking with Satan

The Wishing Tree

Last night I had dinner with Lucy and another friend from high school, Kristine. After we ate, we wandered into the courtyard outside the restaurant and found 21 live, potted crape myrtles covered with tiny slips of white paper; written on each slip was someone's wish. It's an art installation that's part of a larger project that Yoko Ono is doing in memory of John Lennon, and eventually all the wishes will be collected from Pasadena and other places and placed in some sort of time capsule on an island off the coast of Iceland. We had fun reading the various wishes. Most of them asked for happiness, world peace, and/or good health; a great many of them revealed people's choices for the upcoming election (Obama seemed to be favored, thank god). A few of them, however, were a little more idiosyncratic:

I wish for the forestry management job to come through.
I wish I was a scratch golfer.
I wish for a monkey.
I wish I could get a job and a place to live.
I wish the voices in my head would start speaking English. I don't understand Chinese.
Michelle get single!
I wish McCain wins, dies & makes Palin president.
I wish to get lucky tonight.
I wish John Lennon was alive.
World peace and $18,000,000.
I wish that I get a snake from Petco.
I wish that I could go skydiving.
To not have man boobs!
I wish to be Batman!
I wish my boyfriend had a bigger penis. (On the back, in different handwriting, was written, "I hope he finds out you wished this.")
I wish my kids would go to Harvard.
I wish for another pineapple sandwich.
A man would be nice!!!
I wish I could wear short skirts.

Visitors were invited to add their own wishes to any of the trees, so I grabbed a slip of paper and wrote down what was on my mind at the moment: "I wish I could lose 70 lbs and keep it off forever." When I showed Lucy what I'd wished for, she asked to borrow my pen, and she wrote at the bottom, "Me, too!"

A grand day out

For ages my friend Norman and I have agreed that, although we live in one of the busiest and most interesting metropolitan areas of the country, we don't really get out much. We (and by "we," I especially mean "I") tend to stick to our Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena corridor comfort zone, and we both feel we're missing a lot of what L.A. has to offer. I'm a native Angeleno and thus have seen a few more pockets of the city than Norman has, due simply to having been here so long; Norman's a fairly recent transplant and at least has an excuse. Recently we decided it would both fun and good for us to plan regular outings to see some new sights, try some new restaurants, visit neighborhoods we don't know well, and so on. Yesterday was our first adventure. Norman planned the whole thing and kept it a surprise for me.

After lunch at an old favorite, the Hill Street Cafe, we drove to Forest Lawn, which is probably the biggest and most famous cemetery in L.A. but about which I know almost nothing. I'm sorry to say, I have visited it once before, under sad circumstances. Yesterday, though, we were both feeling pretty jolly and in fact received a stern look from a woman in a black veil when we got out of the car laughing. We hushed up and set off in search of . . . well, something. Norman had a map but he wouldn't tell me whose final resting place we were seeking. We found large, just-this-side-of-garish memorials for Bette Davis and Liberace; we also located Charles Laughton's surprisingly tasteful green marble vault. But it was inside a small alcove called the Columbarium of Radiant Dawn that we found what Norman had been keeping secret: Strother Martin's earthly remains.

You probably don't know who Strother Martin is, and that's a pity. He was a wonderful character actor, busiest during the 1960s and 70s, an intelligent, well-educated man who nonetheless found himself typecast playing what he referred to as "prairie scum." He played memorable roles in Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Cool Hand Luke (in which he uttered the famous line, "What we got here is a failure to communicate"), The Wild Bunch and True Grit. He had the lead in a truly horrible yet hilarious horror film called The Brotherhood of Satan - the sight of him in an open dressing gown with a distended pregnant belly will be burned into my poor brain forever. Strother had this flat, nasal, whiny voice and a sort of gone-to-seed appearance perfectly suited to the roles he played; seeing his name in a movie's cast always gives me a little lift. It was incredibly thoughtful of Norman to seek out Strother Martin's memorial plaque for us to see.

After a cool drink and some time sitting in the shade, we took the Metro out to Western and Hollywood and walked for what seemed like ages to our next destination. Along the way I peppered Norman with questions: Were we going to another cemetery? Was what we were going to see death-related? Was it a place he'd visited before? He didn't say much, basically told me to keep my shirt on and keep walking. While we were waiting to cross a street I suddenly clapped my hands together and said, "Oooh, I have a guess!"

I asked him if we were going to see a mural of Strother Martin that someone had painted on the side of a building somewhere in L.A. I didn't know where this building was, but I'd seen some photos of the mural; it was painted long ago and I had no idea if it was even still around. Norman looked blank and then confused. He said he wished he'd known about the mural because it would be a great companion to our Forest Lawn discovery. We kept walking and walking. We turned down Fountain Avenue and walked some more. We crossed a little street called Kingsley and Norman stopped me. I looked at him and he put his hands on my shoulders and turned me around. And there, on the side of a video shop, was the Strother Martin mural.

"You fucking bitch!" Norman grumbled. I didn't mean to ruin the surprise! I had no idea the mural was even still around. After shooing a drunk out of the way, I took a few pictures and then went in for a closer look. It appears that poor Strother gets graffitied often, although it looks like someone tries to clean him up pretty regularly, too. Isn't that bizarre, a big mural of an actor most people have never heard of, right in the middle of a run-down mixed-use Hollywood neighborhood? It made my day. The walk back to the Metro seemed considerably shorter than the trek out to the mural. I need to come up with a plan for our next outing, and I suddenly feel as if the bar has been set very high indeed.

One of a kind

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Assessment

My much-needed vacation is now over. I spent 10 days doing not much at all: I saw two movies, went to two plays, finished two cross stitch pieces and started a third, attended one concert, visited one mall, baked one Barefoot Contessa recipe, and attempted to read a classic novel. I became a fan of the new HBO show True Blood and caught up with the current season of Mad Men. I worked on crossword puzzles and undertook a small landscaping project in my backyard and played the piano and sang and sang and sang because no one was around to hear me. I took a little day-trip down to San Diego, where the weather and company could not have been more perfect. I slept pretty well most nights and drank a few glasses of wine and overall had a good time doing exactly as I pleased.

*Sigh* And now it's over.

Shine on

Tonight is the harvest moon, the full moon that falls closest to the autumnal equinox. This time of year, the moon rises very shortly after sunset, and farmers used to extend their shortening fall days with the light of the harvest moon. I thought about cooking up some sort of harvest festival thing to celebrate the occasion -- I'm always trying to think of ways to start some sort of pagan tradition -- but as usual I started planning too late. The feast of just-harvested crops, games, and romance will instead consist of pesto and garlic bread, an episode or two of Dexter, and . . . well, possibly some romance. Those pagans were always trying to work sex into their celebrations, an effort I heartily support.

Those of you in search of a little pagan excitement this evening might want to check out the original Wicker Man.

At last!

Sean and Curtis' first feature film is finally going to be available on DVD! You can pre-order it through Amazon as well as some other online outlets that Sean told me about but I've now forgotten in the excitement. The release date is November 4.

Sean directed this fine, old-school horror film. He and Curtis wrote it together, and you can see Curtis onscreen in a substantial supporting role. My pal Norman also appears in a dialogue-free but crucial bit part, billed as, I believe, "Man with Dog." I'm not in the movie but my hard work is evident all over the place -- I worked as the caterer, and although the actors are all quite trim, clearly none of them are starving. I consider it a job well done.

Anyway, if you have the constitution for graphic gore and enjoy hearing the line "What the fuck?" repeatedly, consider purchasing a copy and supporting your local independent filmmakers. You can watch a trailer for The Craving here.

Just. . . . damn

I'm not tech-savvy enough to know, so please tell me: is this Photoshopped? I'm really worried that it's not.

Impulse items of the week

These are impulse items because they hardly qualify as "books." We have them on display at the back register and they've been a hit with both customers and my fellow employees. If the artwork in these pamphlets is to be believed, both candidates are briefs men -- but only McCain wears a t-shirt. Obama's definitely the better deal for the $7.95 cover price, because you get paper dolls of Michelle and their daughters as well; their presence, however, reduces the size of his wardrobe. McCain, who is competing only with paper Cindy for the closet space between these covers, has plenty of boring old man clothes -- including the bulletproof vest he wore on his trip to Iraq. Sweet!

Obama is outselling McCain 6 to 1.

Another ending

My sister Susan told me at the end of last week that she and her husband are getting divorced. It sounds very amicable, which will ease the pain for their little boy Jake. I really love both of them so it has been hard to think about, although they both seem to be taking it calmly. My poor sister Mary seems more broken up about it than they do.

*Sigh* I guess it won't mean any more Christmas cards like the one they sent out several years ago, when Jake was just a baby. The three of them are posed on the steps of the hot tub deck that Chuck had recently built. There they are, the smiling, happy threesome. . . and it wasn't until after the cards had been mailed that someone noticed the marijuana plants growing in the decorative pots on either side of them. Oops.

Sean's and my tenth anniversary is on Saturday. We're the only ones of our siblings, besides my never-married sister Karen, who haven't been divorced.