Five Smooth Stones, Five Sore Coyotes

They agitate our kitties from the valley next door. They gibber like scary girl-ghosts at night. They dare prowl the streets by day.

They are the coyotes of California. And their days are numbered.

Well, their haunches are numbered anyhow. Behold my new stealth missile launcher:

I call it the Varminator. The varmints will soon call it “The Invisible God That Spanks My Butt at Night.” They want to howl? I’ll give the devils reason to howl.

Morgan the Penguin and Bjorn the Gnome already know the power of the Varminator. Soon the world will know.

Turtle Quest

High above the San Fernando and Simi Valleys, but not all that high, the jumble of sandstone boulders known as the Simi Hills sits quietly, thinking its long dull geological thoughts. Adventurers desiring to share those thoughts may do so easily by hiking a loop upon its crown known to the Chumash as the Sage Ranch Trail. We pilgrims two made that journey yesterday and now returned, we here spread before you the photographs taken amid the aromatic chapperal, circling hawks and largely decorative clouds.

The prime object of our exploration was a fabled rock formation known to the Chumash as Turtle Rock because of its uncanny resemblance to a rock. We did not gain that object. Great winds blew us back in a maelstrom of dust, frustrating our attempt to “capture the Turtle.” The elusive tortoise escaped our probing lens. Other fabled rock formations were less fortunate. See:

This is the fabled and elusive natural formation known to the Chumash as “Dinosaur Rock.” Legend has it the rock comes alive once every seventeen years and spits a single pebble. The direction of the pebble’s flight, its color and shape, and various other qualities and conditions prevailing at the time of Dinosaur Rock’s brief awakening, are said to accurately predict the weather over the next seventeen years. At the time of our obsevation Dinosaur Rock spit no pebble and so we remain “agnostic” regarding the truth of the legend.Without leaving the main trail, travellers may look in awe upon the chunk of stone known to the Chumash as “Owl Rock” though, of course, the Chumash used their own word for it: Eulengebirgsklumpen. The legends associated with this natural wonder are suspiciously similar to those associated with Dinosaur Rock — coming alive, spitting pebbles and so on — leading ethnologists to wonder — and not for the first time — whether the Chumash were “pulling their legs.”

Before howling winds drove us back to the parking lot (parking fee: $5), we trembled before the Rock Giant. This wonder — we hesitate to call it a “natural” wonder — is but the top, the head, of a Rock Giant buried in the Simi Hills long ago by a great Shaman — or so the Chumash say with perfectly straight faces. The unwary traveller must be kept at a distance from the murmuring creature by a barbed wire fence lest he succumb to the sweet entreaties of the Rock Giant to “come closer… closer…” and be ground to powder between stone jaws.

How to Get There.

Go to the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles. Are you there? Okay. There’s a north-south street running along the west side of the Valley called “Valley Circle Drive.” From the 101, take Valley Circle north. From the 118 take it south. Either way you go, when you get to Cardinal Wolsey Street — there’s a big sign for Boeing and Rocketdyne (they used to test rockets here) — turn and climb the steep twisty road for about 2.4 miles all the way to the top. There you will see a parking area and a sign letting you know you’ve arrived at the Sage Ranch Trail. A scary single-lane paved road with a sharp drop-off into a ravine at the bottom of which lie dozens of smoldering SUVs carries you another half-mile to an upper parking area with a picnic table (if you do hunger) and a port-o-poddy (if you do not).

Et in Arcadia Beard Papa

So taken were the NiceWork mobile crew by the image of Beard Papa in Arcadia, CA, that they were compelled to arrest their northward progress on Alec Baldwin Avenue so they could bring you, the reader, a photographic record of his genial face. The signage is that of a gourmet sweet shop also known as Muginoho (麦の穂).

Evidently more  than Eggos are et in Arcadia. But what? What does Beard Papa serve?

A Woman in Red, passing by at the time of the shoot, trailing an empty shopping cart, did nothing to dispel the mystery.

Pictures taken, the crew climbed back onto the NiceWorkWagon and fled the scene, leaving the Woman in Red speechless.

Total elapsed time: seven minutes, thirty-six seconds

Roo Morgue

Is there such a thing as Couvade Syndrome for travelling? Madame NiceWork did the globetrotting, not me, and yet I’m the one whose internal clock needs to be set back nine hours. Had it been me and not her who endured the long flight from Berlin (A highly classified mission. Don’t ask.) I could hardly feel woozier or more whacked in the Circadians than I do at the moment. The wooz puts the kibosh on any chance of writing a coherent post for NiceWork, and yet…

…and yet, I must post something, anything, if only to push that montage of thriller authors — the collaborators on The Copper Bracelet – down a couple of screens. I can no longer bear to look at them. Especially I can longer bear the baleful stare of Jeffrey Deaver. You know, I’ve seen Mr Deaver at a book signing in Naperville, IL. He’s a jolly, happy, jokey guy, full of stories and amiable chat. But you wouldn’t know it from that evil photo: There he glares malevolently like one of the psychoperps who keep his fictional detectives employed.

So, look: Here’s a novel that had me in stitches during my foot-soaking downtime between sightseeing bouts in NYC recently. It’s the first novel by Jonatham Lethem, from fifteen fraught years ago: Gun, with Occasional Music.

Now, understand, I normally look with cold disdain on the private eye pastiche — into which catergory Gun, with Occasional Music falls in a loopy sci-fi, Neal Stephensonish sort of way — and certainly a blurb from the wretched Newsweek, if not exactly a deal-killer, is no recommendation for this reader — and if that blurb compares Lethem favorably to Philip K. Dick with whose drug-soaked deleriums I am out of sympathy, well, then you may reasonably ask why I didn’t hurriedly put the volume back on the shelf and continue to rummage through the Flatiron District Barnes and Noble?

I’ll tell you why: the epigraph. The epigraph reads thus:

There was nothing to it. The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.
—Raymond Chandler

But not just the epigraph qua epigraph. I delved a bit and saw that Lethem had written a book in which Chandler’s metaphor was taken literally. There really is a kangaroo, maybe not in a dinner jacket, but cast in the part of the tough-guy wannabee gunsel, like Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon (the part played by Elisha Cook, Jr.). Other key characters are also animals, “evolved animals,” in this alternate reality novel, or dystopic future, or satire, or spoof, or jape or whatever it is. Anyhow, I was hooked, and the novel did not disappoint. Far from it. Many laughs, as when our “private inquisitor” (i.e. detective) hero answers the doorbell and…

A neatly dressed woman in her late twenties or early thirties stood in the doorway, and behind her a young guy in a suit and tie was walking up the steps. “Hello,” she said.

I said hello back.

“We’re students of psychology. If you’re not too busy, we’d like to read you a few selections from Freud’s Civilization and it Its Discontents.“

They’re “Freud nuts.” It’s that kind of book, except in addition to all the absurd invention there actually is a murder mystery to solve and the private inquisitor solves it using clues peculiar to the world Lethem has created.

I would tell you all about that world — the government supplied “forgetol” drugs, the evolved “babyheads,” the musical news reports (no words, just mood music) — but as I said, I’m too woozy and I’ve just remembered the tuna salad in the fridge so I’ll answer the only question pertinent when recommending a novel. Will you enjoy Gun, with Occasional Music? Yes, absolutely. No doubt. Guaranteed. You will thank me.

Oh, and there really is a gun that, when brandished, plays appropriately ominous background music.

Gun, with Occasional Music
by Jonathan Lethem
(Harvest Books, Paperback, 269pp.)

The Copper MacGuffin

So enthralled was I by the exciting conclusion of The Copper Bracelet — an audiobook thriller of 17 chapters written by 16 different authors — that I misjudged the distance to the spice rack (after having added some zip to my Manwich Samwich) and dropped a jar of precious Penzey’s ground cloves. But did I cry over spilled spices? Not a bit. For one thing, it made the kitchen redolent of the mysterious East in which the concluding action is set. For another… well, as I said at the beginning of the paragraph, I was enthralled.

The final chapter of the novelty novel was written by the same thriller writer who got the ball rolling in chapter one, Jeffrey Deaver. His job in the beginning is to set up enough story-stuff — characters, hint of a plot, mysterious clues (e.g., the eponymous jewelry), and a bit of rousing loss-of-head-and-appendages action — to give the rest of the writers (each taking a chapter) something to build on. One by one, the other authors elaborate on his suggestions, adding villains, exploding villains, advancing (sometimes) the story, and wrongfooting (oftentimes) each other.

At last, the virtual stack of coffee-stained manuscripts is shoved back into the hands of the aghast first author. It is then his bounden duty to tie up all the loose ends, and dole appropriate rewards to whichever heroes and bad guys have miraculously survived the gauntlet of his extraordinarily bloodthirsty colleagues. Clever Mr. Deaver does so with the adroitness we’ve all come to expect from him.

The roster of authors, pictured above covered in Penzey’s ground cloves, includes — besides Mr. Deaver — David Hewson, John Gilstrap, Lisa Scottoline (who gets the prize for the most unexpected scene change: a chicken farm in which the hens are named after Gilbert and Sullivan heroines), David Corbett, Jenny Siler, P.J. Parrish (well, that’s two writers actually), Jon Land, Gayle Lynds, Jim Fusilli (also the editor), Joseph Finder, Lee Child, Linda Barnes, David Liss, Brett Battles and James Phelan.

The Copper Bracelet is read to perfection by the awesomely skilled actor Alfred Molina. You may remember him as the love-struck Russian sailor in the movie Letter to Brezhnev (1985), though you don’t.

The protagonist of The Copper Bracelet is the same fellow who did the heavy lifting in the last multiple-author audio-thriller, The Chopin Manuscript: a musicoligist turned hunter of war criminals, Harold Middleton. This time Middleton and his NGO gang of terror-stoppers dash without a pause for breath from the Riviera, to London, to Tampa, to Paris, to Moscow, to Kashmir and to a chicken farm, all the while uncovering a dastardly plot. A plot (and here I’m a bit hazy) either to produce “heavy water” for production of weapons grade plutonium, or to blow up a damn in Kashmir, or to kill Middleton and his pals, or to kill Hillary Clinton, or maybe even kill her boss, or possibly to start a world war, or, alternately, to free Kashmir, or, on the other hand, to put Kashmir in the control of the Chinese, or the Russians, or none of these or all of them. Or something else. Sorry; I was distracted while sweeping up Penzey’s ground cloves during the scene in which the penultimate bad-person delivers his or her explanatory peroration.

Maybe you will pay closer attention and can straighten me out. Go ahead, if you’re so smart: You can obtain the audiobook through iTunes or through Audible.com for a pittance.

El Mejor Pintor de Calabazas

Poor Luis Meléndez! Back in the 18th century he poured out his entire frustrated life on canvas after painstaking canvas depicting exactly the texture of Spanish produce, and then what happens? He dies in poverty. The old, old story. For artists at least. Art historians have frequent recourse to their QuicKeys macro that plonks out “he died in poverty.”

It ended on a downbeat, but his life was not wasted: During his productive decades he helped keep the canvas trade alive at least, and now, posthumously, he provides employment to so many worthy souls attached to the business of art: See that guard in the photo above, for instance, who tried to duck behind the pillar bearing the Meléndez poster at LACMA, but whom I captured anyhow. He owes his meal ticket, in part, to the pauper’s labor.

Meléndez, even from his aethereal cloud, helped pay the cable TV bills of the Angeleno plasterers who cunningly made two galleries on the 3rd floor of LACMA’s Ahmanson Building resemble a chamber in an ancient Spanish castillo. Note the pock marks.

Sr Meléndez perhaps does not mind — not now anyways — that he broke his back and went permanently cross-eyed getting the play of light on beaten copper just so, when he considers, up there in the better place he has resided these past two and a half centuries, the gainful employment he has provided the producers of the tie-in publications on sale in the museum shop, and to the manufacturers of the refrigerator magnets bearing images of his exacting arrangements of grapes and gourds, chocolate mixers, pigeons, pears big and little, jellied fruit, boxed nougat, eggplants, glazed honey pots, what appear to be heirloom tomatoes, and whatever else the merry teamsters hauled in from the plots of grateful peasants to leave in heaps in the painter’s unremunerative studio.

Meléndez will pour down blessings upon your head if you visit this rare gathering of his life’s futile work — including one figure: a fine self portrait — which will continue at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until January 3, 2010. More information HERE.

Assassins R Us

It's Robin Meade!

The assassination business has come a long way since John Wilkes Booth. It would be going too far to call it respectable — the practitioners themselves would blench at the praise — but the field is getting crowded. Mark Greaney in his authorial debut, The Gray Man, gives us yet another relentless wet-work professional.

His name is… I forget. Chambers, I think. Or “Rooms.” The book is over there, but it’s out of reach. It doesn’t matter anyhow, since this guy, this one-man-army, is known mostly by his nickname, “Gray Man,” a nom-de-guerre he earned by… I don’t remember. Perhaps he is gray.

Gray Man kills people, but only bad people. An American, given a burn notice by the CIA (whose agents have standing orders to kill him on sight), he now plies his lonely trade for a British security firm catering to multinational companies, which, though themselves inherently evil, still sometimes require the assassination of people — African warlords, say — who are even more evil. Gray Man is merciless to his foes, we are told (and in those very words), but also ethical somehow, we vaguely understand. He is so secret he is known only to his snooty British boss, Sir Nigel Eliott Faw-faw Fotheringale (or something like that; I don’t remember exactly), yet nonetheless has an international reputation. He is spoken about in whispers, but thousands whisper.

He is so well-known, in fact, that when the workings of the plot require him to travel from Turkey to Normandy to rescue the eight-year-old grandchildren of his snooty employer (the twin girls having been kidnapped by an evil multinational), hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of professional assassins and “street experts” (experts in streets) are arrayed between him and his goal. I don’t want to give away too much of the story, but he kills every single one of them. His technique is pretty much to run at his target really fast and kill him. Gray, though unstoppable, is not invincible: he is shot, stabbed, rolled down an Alp and dropped in a cistern. He falls into the Seine. I think he’s blown up, too, but I can’t remember.

The Gray Man is the sort of book where the manufacturer of every weapon is mentioned along with its caliber and magazine capacity. I enjoyed it immensely and read all 450 pages of its Bobbsey Twins prose with perfect pleasure.

The Gray Man
by Mark Greaney
(Jove Books, Mass Market Paperback, 464pp.)
Publication Date: September 2009

Claude Monet, His Mark

One of the things that gets me about paintings is the sense of the painter still hanging around. You can almost see the artist dabbing away, limning long strokes, feathering a gradation, taking a sandwich break.

Go as far back as woolly mammoth days, and paintings already have that quality. G. K. Chesterton wrote about the Lascaux cave-paintings:

They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognize…

Even highly conventionalized painting like the stuff they where turning out back when Egypt was top of the heap can’t completely sublimate the individual. Sure, professional tomb decorator, Fek-At-Fut, didn’t get to stamp a personal cartouche on his pictograph of Hoptha the Ibis, but you can detect Mr. Fut in his graceful precision, his easy discipline in drawing out the curve in the ibis’s beak, or the arc of Bastet’s feline back. Those lines aren’t just beautiful because of how the creatures look; they’re beautiful because they are how we move.

More recent stuff doesn’t make you work so hard to sense the artist. You see a Van Gogh, you think “ear.” To stand before a boxcar-sized painting by Turner and imagine the eminent Victorian in top hat and tails swabbing away at it with a mop of paint is part of the fun. And can you look at a Renoir, or Pissaro, or anything by everyone’s fave, Claude Monet, and not feel a sort of kinesthetic sympathy that almost makes you raise your own hand in imitation of the artist’s daubing?

That’s why I took the picture of Monet’s signature above . There’s the guy himself. His mark is so his own. At once casual and as formally binding as a signature on an Imperial Fiat. It looks as though M. Monet, finished with the canvas, couldn’t quite bring himself to lay down his palette, but indulged in this one last sequence of graceful gestures to keep the ball rolling a few moments longer.

Fek-At-Fut and Hoptha the Ibis

Addendum: See the entire Monet picture — it’s called The Stroller — by clicking on the photo way at the top, or, if you worry that the energy expended scrolling up the entire page contributes needlessly to Global Warming, thereby dooming the higher life forms on the planet, no problem! Stay right where you are, concerned citizen, and click on the words MONET PAINTED THIS.

Got Melk?

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the day when the Dutch explorer Henry Hudson turned right at Mannahatta Island and was floored to discover a river named after him. To celebrate that boat trip, the curators of the Met — having already rejected the idea of an exhibit of plaster garden statues of the little Dutch boy and little Dutch girl kissing — asked the curators of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam if they could borrow Vermeer’s famous painting The Milkmaid for a couple of months.

Next thing you know, there I am standing “on line” (as they say in the East) waiting to get into an entire exhibit built around the display of this one painting. Don’t let the photo above mislead you as to the actual size of The Milkmaid. Pointy Hand A indicates the kind of wall-sized enlargement so beloved of exhibit designers. Making the unwashed public feel tiny seems to be as much a goal of museum directors as it is a delight to us, the hoi polloi. Give us an enlarged molecule to stand in, or a capillary to slide through, and we’ll call it a day well-spent. The actual painting is only about 13 inches wide.

As Pointy Hand B tells us, though, no picture-taking was vouchsafed the herd. We had only to drink in the Dutch beneficence in gratitude and shuffle off to the next silk-screened wall-ful of explanatory text in 2-inch type. The Met had turned one painting into a four-gallery affair by bunging in four of their own Vermeers (one was left upstairs for good luck) and other flotsam by contempory painters which we all ignored.

At the show’s entrance, the curators had very cleverly covered a vast wall with repros of all 36 known Vermeers in more-or-less chronological order. I counted the ones I’ve seen in Washington, at the Frick, at Norton Simon, and here at the Met and was surprised to learn I’d seen 13 of the entire bunch. Mrs NiceWork told me of an acquaintance who had made it her life’s goal to see every Vermeer. She planned her vacations accordingly. I thought –I even made that “hmm” sound signifying thought — Vermeer trekking wasn’t such a bad idea, and noted the locations of the other 23.

Also, considering the rapid, ongoing Islamification of the Europe and the fate of the Bamiyan Buddhas under Muslim rule, I wondered if maybe I ought to push the schedule forward a bit.

Me Write Funny One Day

This array of newpaper boxes arrested my jaunty progress up the Avenue, Fifth Avenue, in New York last week. The promise implicit in a “Humor Writing Class” offered by “Gotham Writers’ Workshop” lured me irresistibly. Would have fallen, too, if I had not been days late for the class. For who does not want to express the good humor of your average New Yorker?

But, as I said, the chance had passed, and the headline on the free catalog was only a cruel taunt by the time this tourist strolled by. Just as well, I suppose. After all, if I were to give a lesson in “humor writing” it would consist only of the advice to be born in late 19th century like James Thurber, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner and O. Henry.

But who knows? Maybe I could have picked up a few pointers on how to make this blog post funny.