Took a quick trip up to Los Angeles over the weekend, satisfying in many ways - including the unsettling way in which the fruits of all times and places are available here but jumbled, cracks showing. (But cracks are the way the light gets in...) At the UCLA Library I found a book of lovely Byzantine illustrations of the Book of Job - above: Job's friends holding their noses, tearing their clothes, weeping. (It would make a striking cover for a book of interpretations of the Book of Job, no?) At the
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion I saw ABT's lavish and heartbreaking production of Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" (Kenneth MacMillan's choreography, principals Paloma Herrera & David Hallberg, both as light of foot as angels); dramatically it mops the floor with "West Side Story." I stayed over with my friend G, who lives in the Village Green, a survivor from the idyllic Los Angeles of the 1940s with broad expanses of green between light-filled apartments: easy vehicle access from the outside,
but not a car in sight from within. It's also where she experienced her first earthquake - she described a vaguely exalting experience of connectedness to the earth which reminded me of my first earthquake in Japan, which was similarly thrilling - once I decided that being on the second floor of a 2-story wooden dwelling I was probably safe to enjoy the rocking and rolling! (I grew up with earthquakes, but you don't really get in the groove on the ground floor, at least if it isn't The Big One.)
Sunday my friends G, D and I had great Huevos a la Mexicana at a place called La Abeja (in a neighborhood I think is called Mt. Washington), and popped into the new
cathedral for a peek; that's Joan of Arc at right, in the remarkable computer-stitched murals of the communion of the saints by John Nava. And then, since it is LA after all, to an LA original: the
Museum of Jurassic Technology. It's hard to know what to say about it; most people just rave and say that you have to experience it for
yourself. (Telling internet plug:
go check it out if you want to see a museum that isn't your everyday snooze fest type museum.) I'll say it's remarkably well done, and does awaken the memory of a credulous wonder to which LA products from "The Twilight Zone" to "The X-Files," "Magnolia," and "Mulholland Drive" also appeal. What's real? What's true? Maybe everything is a hoax, the real and the true too. Perhaps in these post-modern times we are open to the truly real only in things we
suspect may be hoaxes, and the true martyrs to truth are those who pursue chimeras they, despite all odds, are convinced are true. Who needs religion or art or even science when you've got unexplained mysteries, an appreciation for craft and quirk and misunderstood genius, and feel the resonances between
Noah's Ark and the trailer park? (I confess: there's probably a sense in which the university library, the ballet, the cathedral are my snobby trailer parks, my hoaxy Arks.)
Took a quick trip up to Los Angeles over the weekend, satisfying in many ways - including the unsettling way in which the fruits of all times and places are available here but jumbled, cracks showing. (But cracks are the way the light gets in...) At the UCLA Library I found a book of lovely Byzantine illustrations of the Book of Job - above: Job's friends holding their noses, tearing their clothes, weeping. (It would make a striking cover for a book of interpretations of the Book of Job, no?) At the 
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion I saw ABT's lavish and heartbreaking production of Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" (Kenneth MacMillan's choreography, principals Paloma Herrera & David Hallberg, both as light of foot as angels); dramatically it mops the floor with "West Side Story." I stayed over with my friend G, who lives in the Village Green, a survivor from the idyllic Los Angeles of the 1940s with broad expanses of green between light-filled apartments: easy vehicle access from the outside, 
but not a car in sight from within. It's also where she experienced her first earthquake - she described a vaguely exalting experience of connectedness to the earth which reminded me of my first earthquake in Japan, which was similarly thrilling - once I decided that being on the second floor of a 2-story wooden dwelling I was probably safe to enjoy the rocking and rolling! (I grew up with earthquakes, but you don't really get in the groove on the ground floor, at least if it isn't The Big One.)
Sunday my friends G, D and I had great Huevos a la Mexicana at a place called La Abeja (in a neighborhood I think is called Mt. Washington), and popped into the new cathedral for a peek; that's Joan of Arc at right, in the remarkable computer-stitched murals of the communion of the saints by John Nava. And then, since it is LA after all, to an LA original: the Museum of Jurassic Technology. It's hard to know what to say about it; most people just rave and say that you have to experience it for 
yourself. (Telling internet plug: go check it out if you want to see a museum that isn't your everyday snooze fest type museum.) I'll say it's remarkably well done, and does awaken the memory of a credulous wonder to which LA products from "The Twilight Zone" to "The X-Files," "Magnolia," and "Mulholland Drive" also appeal. What's real? What's true? Maybe everything is a hoax, the real and the true too. Perhaps in these post-modern times we are open to the truly real only in things we 
suspect may be hoaxes, and the true martyrs to truth are those who pursue chimeras they, despite all odds, are convinced are true. Who needs religion or art or even science when you've got unexplained mysteries, an appreciation for craft and quirk and misunderstood genius, and feel the resonances between Noah's Ark and the trailer park? (I confess: there's probably a sense in which the university library, the ballet, the cathedral are my snobby trailer parks, my hoaxy Arks.)