CIAO!

So the day is finally almost here. We leave for New York in the morning and then for Italy on Friday.

We have to take Molly to the kennel this afternoon. She senses something's up. It's a nice place where she's staying, but it's the hardest thing about traveling for us.

I posted a silly storyboard for my section of Toons x 9 here. The illustration above is from the storyboard. Just something to keep you laughing. It was a peculiar project- 9 animators retelling Faust.

I opted for a soap opera approach to hell- at the time airlines weren't as nasty as they are now and computers weren't part of most people's lives. I didn't ever color it in and got rushed to even scan this and put it on line. I never saw what any of the other animators did. In fact I don't even know who they were. Marv Newland (Bambi Meets Godzilla) paid us to do it. Faust is no treat to read, let me tell you! The link is slow to load even though I broke it into segments, and you'll see a white screen before the loading symbol kicks in.

One more thing about the toons project. Aloosha was based on a woman I met the last time I was in New York, 22 years ago! Her name was Lizzie Borden and she was a filmmaker who hoped we'd collaborate on something. She had that "I work out all day" look. I forget if she was a kleptomaniac or not!

I had insane good luck at the track last week and will buy a new tablet computer when I get back, and I guarantee no way in hell will it be a Mac.

Don't even get me started on Steve Job's arrogance re Flash, when you can read it in the paper anyway!

Have fun while I'm away, and hope to check up on you all from an internet cafe in Italy.

Reading Manly Men Bios!

Ha, got you there! While I was in New Jersey I read Robert Mitchum's biography, "Baby, I Don't Care." What a character, this big sexy coolster, part Norwegian, part Indian, smarter than anyone would expect and hard to define. The book is a bit long (500+ pp) but you think about him long after it's done. One of the things people remembered about him the most, aside from his "I don't care" bohemianism, and his incredible face, was that he was a great story teller.

Last summer I was really intrigued by Raoul Walsh's autobiography,"Each Man in his Time" . As a child his parents entertained famous Broadway actor of the day Edwin Thomas Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth whom Walsh was later to play in The Birth of a Nation (1915). They lived on a farm somewhere near Harlem and entertained all the most famous people of their day it seemed.

Being an autobiography, this book had a lot more insight into the life of a man who traveled with and filmed Pancho Villa in Mexico, and had stories that were just breathtaking. He didn't seem happy except when he was making a movie. He was a director for 50+ years!

Robert Mitchum and Raoul Walsh intersect briefly in the 40's.

What got me thinking was this: both men were known for being great story tellers, both men were major figures in Hollywood history. Who's a great story teller anymore? Movies today have so little story line. People today rarely tell stories in social situations. Hmm, is there something here?

And that's actually the point of this post. I got to thinking.

Airports Observed

Paranoia was the theme during my visit to my mother, and it still echoed on the way home.

The name on my ticket was misspelled so I knew I had a good chance of running into trouble at the Philadelphia Airport on my way back. This port is known for its nasty employees; in fact they sent a Team Disney to the Philly airport to jollify them all- I read about that in the paper last year. Some of the employees did have big smiles this time, and my name was not a problem.

But then...

At the x ray machine I got pulled aside by a Czech looking luggage inspector who seemed really scared. I think he thought he'd found a live one.

When the inspector started looking through my suitcase he was practically shaking. He said, "DON'T TOUCH YOUR SUITCASE WHILE I'M LOOKING THROUGH IT!"

My nephew works at a chocolate factory and is the product manager for those fancy Lindt bars- high end chocolate for low end customers... the skinny bars that are grabbing shelf space in Walmart, Target, and probably your local supermarket. My brother had given me a lovely selection of the bars, plus EEK! a one pound can of cocoa, with the lid taped. The scotch tape give it that improv explosive look.

Slowly the cocoa can was pulled from my suitcase. He turned it on all sides, then put it in the encased rounded deploder, and set it on spin cycle. I don't know. It passes inspection. He puts it back in my luggage and sends it through the x ray machine again. And I'm on my way. It was kind of fun. I felt special.

On the airplane the flight attendant spilled a glass of water on the guy aisle seat in my row, and also on his silk shirt. Way to go girly. She mopped him and it up with paper napkins and he was amazingly gracious. Somewhere back this year I did a little cartoon on spills.

In Phoenix I had a greasy lunch outside a sports bar. The waiter called me "luv". After I left I sat a few gates down from the bar and read my creepy novel about life in Mandalay in the 1880s.
("The Lacquer Lady" by F. Jesse Tennyson.)

In Phoenix some of the airport cops ride bicycles, not Segways. There seemed to be a higher alert going on than the usual orange. Marigold? Blood Orange? I saw a group of obese TSA boys and gals walking in formation back and forth in our wing. Odd. By formation I mean all in a horizontal line holding their soda cups.

Then I noticed the bicycle cops had pulled MY waiter out of the sports bar and were questioning him for about 30 minutes, right until there was some other excitement. When I woke this morning I thought, if I were really paranoid or guilty, I'd think they were asking him what I ate.

Further excitement: an old black man wearing a beret and carrying a cane wandered through an exit door setting off big alarms, and causing a TSA agent to pull a gun on him. wooee! Who needs tv? Just go hang out at an airport!

I also listened to the pilots of the prop plane I flew out on explain to the flight attendant what he was supposed to do on the flight, apparently his first one. This was right before we boarded. At least it wasn't the flight attendant explainng to the pilots wht they were supposed to do!

Thanks!

Thanks all around. Kevin Stafford won the Ultimate Rachel Alexandra Fan Contest and will get all the goodies tomorrow at Monmouth Park. If you get TVG you'll see him walking with his new favorite horse. I know many of you voted, and that was so nice of you.

And I started this twitter drawing chain and wonder where it's going, and what's the protocol. We had Linda Davick, (ldavick), Namowal (othernamowal), RussellSteeleOH, wegwag (Marti Mcginess), tinyowls, and tasha26 all drawing.

If you choose to start a chain or continue one, be sure to add the @biz in the box at the bottom, otherwise the others may never see it or know anything was drawn. It seems to spiral out.

All were based on one lumpy drawing at the start. It's fun to run the playback over at twitter and see what was changed. I don't even know how tasha26 ran into the picture or who tasha26 is, but a nice contribution.

Have a good Saturday. I'm reading an excellent mystery, "Don't Look Back" by Karin Fossum, a Norwegian writer I found by accident in the library.

Crime Novelist:: Kjell Eriksson

If you like Scandinavian crime novels, you've probably lamented that you've read everything Henning Mankell has written, since it's unlikely there will be more Kurt Wallendar novels. But take heart:

Kjell Eriksson is almost as good. I'd read "Princess of Burundi" and thought it was pretty good, with female detective and single mother Ann Lindell at the center of the book, but I liked "The Cruel Stars of the Night" and "The Demon of Dakar" even better, again with Ann as the main character.

The hot Scandinavian novel right now is "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" but I didn't care for it.

Looking forward to a trip to the library next week, because I've run out of books! I don't just read crime novels, but was quite taken with two just read.

Happy 4th of July,wherever you spend it. We're going to see the parade in town, then the barbecue, but doubtful if we'll head back in for the fireworks. We were at the races in Ridgway today, and are going back on Sunday.

Got any books to recommend for me?

3 Good Books (plus 1)

I was very lucky on my last trip East to bring along three books to read, each of which was very good, all quite different from one another. With the help of my Amazon change jar I've read a stack of books since the start of the year, but most of them were heave ho's aside from these three:
The Bad Seed by William Taylor. This is the second time I've read this scary story of a charming little girl who kills people because of her greed. It was a huge hit in 1953, also a movie, (which I haven't seen), but the author died before it was published. Set in the high social world of a small Southern town, the writing is careful, beautiful and memorable, and so is little Rhoda...

The Trees by Conrad Richter. This wonderful book, recommended by my friend Ann V., is the first in the author's "Awakening Land" trilogy. I've just ordered the second book. Published in 1940, it's the story of a pioneer family settling in Ohio in the early days of this country when Ohio was still the frontier. Richter was particularly interested in capturing the language of the pioneers which he believed was unlike the formal speech you imagine, and which trickled down in dialects of country people.

Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. This Swedish detective novel is I guess the groundbreaker for all the Swedish crime books which have followed over the years. The lead character is detective Martin Beck. It even has a well written introduction by Henning Mankell, the best of all these writers, who seems to have stopped writing his great Kurt Wallendar novels, although a group of short stories about Kurt Wallendar's early years is coming my way.

A friend gave us The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, a very short and charming satirical book about reading and the royal life. The main character is Queen Elizabeth. I haven't quite finished it.

The heave ho's are stacked in the back: The Torso, Sunstorm, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Princess of Burundi, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. The first four are all Swedish crime novels, highly touted, just not very good.

Because of my years in Berkeley, and because I grew up in Chatham and my brother dated her, I enjoyed the Alice Waters book. I only ate in the restaurant twice though, and it certainly wasn't the world I was living in, in Berkeley.

What have you been reading lately?

Trying to make sense

All our family pictures are set to appear as a screen saver on this computer. Yours may be too. As they fly by I sometimes see pictures I don't remember ever taking, and trying to find them can be quite a task.

I saw this picture of Dinah's goat Margarethe reading the Los Angeles Times in 2003 and just had to track it down. Do you think she reads the San Francisco Chronicle now that she lives in Davis?

Wildlife

We drove up to Mountain Village today. The gondola is closed until ski season. The place was deserted. As we were driving out I said, "There's not even a coyote around", and just then we saw this one. An instant later it pounced on the ground, probably after a vole, a coyote's pop-tart.

Yesterday on our hike we saw nine bear poops. It was a gray spooky sky and a hidden trail beside a canyon stream which gave it all a Halloween feeling, but no bear seen. We're not scaed of black bears, except we don't know how Molly would react. If this were grizzly country, we would have been out of there!

Fourteen wild turkeys have been passing by our house single file each day for the last couple, such a treat to see, such a vulnerable way for them to travel.

I was sad to read of Studs Turkel's death. A great journalist and writer. His book "Working", a collection of interviews of all sorts of people talking about the work they did, was full of depth and compassion. I saw him at a book reading on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley in the 70's. An old Chicago newspaper guy-- a lot of very talented writers got their starts in the Chicago rags. Ever read Ben Hecht's "Child of the Century"? A great autobiography.

Short Story Authors I've Liked

In no particular order, these are short story authors I've liked a lot:

Ring Lardner (master of the form)
John O'Hara (under-rated author)
Bobbie Ann Mason
T.C. Boyle (but his 8 pound story collection is just too heavy.)
Eudora Welty (wonder if I would still like them though.)
J.D. Salinger
Turgenev

I used to like Saki as a teen, and Poe of course. So many comic book stories really qualify as short stories too.

hmm, umm, list is shorter than I thought it would be. I used to always buy those Pushcart Annuals of short stories but haven't in a while. And the Best American Short Story collection. Although I've read good stories in the New Yorker, so often I'm left with the huh, what was that about?

Any writer you'd like to put on the list?

What about you? Favorite short story authors?

Bare -- no bears

All the yellow and red aspen leaves have fallen, and the landscape is pale gold and bare. Interesting that all the deer and elk we would see on our usual two hour walk are hiding-- it's hunting season-- they must have switched to a nocturnal life style. Smart.

I went to the library in town today and got 5 books: two local history books, two by Lee Child, and another by Annie Proulx.

Kate recommended "Bad Dirt" by Annie Proulx and I liked it very much. It's a group of short stories set in Wyoming. A funny thing was that one story which was particularly long. I thought, "Gee I've read another story that was so much like this. Kind of uninspired." Realized later I'd read it a few years ago in the New Yorker. It was in her grim Wyoming style.

Do you like to read short stories? I do. I like shorter ones better. If they're too long I start counting pages till the end, and sort of resent when they wrap up too.

In some of the stories she gets a bit experimental and it's really fun: slight elements of fantasy woven in, instead of just the grim folks of Wyoming. Like two badgers talking about humans. One of the stories seemed to have been inspired by the punch line of a joke, (didn't quite work.) I wonder if her work is moving more in this direction of these more experimental stories, kind of goofy fantasy elements woven in without being too whimsical.

I haven't read the story that she wrote which the movie "Broke Back Mountain" was based on. Even though the screenplay was co-written by a sometime favorite author, Mr. Lonesome Dove Larry McMurtry, I didn't care for the movie.

Nice Library

Aww, they have an hour for reading to dogs at the Telluride Library. It's a really great, friendly library that's very popular.

Molly seemed to agree with my reviews here, looks as if she took the picture too:



Joan Didion's "Play It as it Lays" was way too grim unless you're into 60's anorexic drugged out Hollywood people and L.A. hippies.

Lee Child's thriller "Nothing to Lose" was very exciting, well written and set in a fictional small town in Colorado. Of course I enjoyed it. Jack Reacher got rough and tough and eventually left town.

"The Conjurer's Bird", by Martin Davies, was wonderful. I was thinking of the author Robertson Davies when I picked it out, but this novel suited me perfectly, about a taxidermist/leading man, ha, how's that for nuts?, who's on the trail of a bird extinct in the 1700's. It's a bit of a mystery, and the end is wrapped up a bit too neatly, but there's wonderful writing and nice cross cutting between the past and present.

After the library we went to the Farmer's Market, where they seemed to have no idea of the financial condition of the world. We picked out a squash, but when they told us it was $7.00 we put it back. Instead we took the free gondola up to the market in Mountain Village where we got a normal priced squash and a piece of salmon, then rode back down again.



the world is mighty yellow here but a big storm is coming later today, with a winter storm warning flashing when I check the weather site.

Two Books I've Liked

Since I've been in a vile and crabby mood off and on ever since my horse Pepper died, exacerbated by Sarah Palin, I thought I'd post two books I've recently read that I like. The bears are tiny and left over from my childhood. They're my rating system.

The Joan Didion book, "The White Album" is filled with essays, mostly about California, but she also discusses Doris Lessing, a writer I could never make sense of, and Didion seems to feel the same way. I think I read this book when it was first published in 1979 and didn't respond to it. This time I thought it was really excellent and I look forward to reading more of her books.

Two bears, two arms up.



I really didn't expect to like this book, a cop thriller set on an army base, but I couldn't put it down. In fact I'm reading another book about the same character, Jack Reacher, right now. Inside one of the covers was a Bill Clinton quote: "I love Jack Reacher."

Two bears, worried about the outcome.

John Fante over rated

The best thing about John Fante's "Ask the Dust" is the introduction by Charles Bukowski which made me think I'd like the book, and I don't even like Charles Bukowski's writing. The descriptions of Los Angeles are pretty decent, but the "I" narrator seems prissy and self pitying while also trying to play the role of hard drinking writer. The female center piece is a melodramatic Mexican marijuana addict waitress who keeps breaking into his hotel room and toking up in the closet, which leads to madness. She was just silly. It did remind me of how important it used to seem to be a writer who gets published, back in days when a short story could pay a signifigant check.

Anyone else here read this book?

I give it one bear, no arms up.

Get Off the Bus

Ken Kesey's bus that is. Finished Kool Aid Acid Test, (the book). He sounded like a bully. I don't particularly recommend it. One interesting thing, though: the first Prankster acid test in Los Angeles was in Northridge of all places, at a Unitarian church shaped like an onion.

Don't Judge a Book by its Cover

  

What's that about?

Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg

I've been reading Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", all about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and their bus trip back and forth across the US. I just finished Larry McMurtry's "The Last Picture Show" which was okay but disappointed me.

I started the Kool-Aid book because I read somewhere that the bus stops at Larry McMurtry's house along the way. Unfortunately it was only a one page stop.

Kool-Aid needs skimming, because it's such an extended trip and trippy writing can be pretty boring. Sometimes it's good though.

So why the video? Hey that's Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. Neal Cassady was the inspiration for Jack Kerouac's main character, Dean Moriarty, in his great novel "On the Road" which I've now been through I think four times since we have the audio version which we play on our drives to Colorado, and I'd already read it before that.

Bear with me-- you've seen my beret and must know I was a junior beatnik in the 50's. This is the first time I've seen real footage of Neal Cassady and could hear his voice. They're at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.

After driving back and forth across the country with Jack Kerouac and inspiring his book, Neal Cassady then drove the Merry Pranksters' bus back and forth across the country more than a decade later. In "Kool-Aid Acid" there's a story about Ken Kesey meeting Jack Kerouac in New York, with Neal Cassady there too, kind of a cultural turning point, and it wasn't a happy meeting, too much jealousy!

Someone's Big Day

Hey! Don't throw that key away! It looks important!

I was going to go to the library to check out Tom Wolfe's "Kool Aid Acid Test", which I don't think I ever read. He writes about the bus stopping at Larry McMurtry's home along the way.

But you don't have to go to the library anymore to see if they have the book-- just check on line. They didn't, but in the process I came upon an amazing feature of the Los Angeles library-- they have a collection of old photos which you can go through by typing any word you want.

Go here and press "Browse the Photo Collection." I spent so many hours just on these photos, and I can imagine there are many more weird and strange. They give a lot of info on where and when and why the photos were taken.

I typed Northridge and Chatsworth, since that's where I live. These are some of the photos.



This is a photo of a strange cult that existed in Chatsworth. Note the speaker's tiptoes and all the bare feet. A suicide bomb ended this cult of mostly women.



This is a picture of a man cutting meat, part of a series on suburban living in Granada Hills. There was also a picture of his wife sitting alone at the same table, eating the meat.



This is (was) film director Joseph von Sternberg's art deco palace designed by Richard Neutra, then demolished to make way for a housing development. Von Sternberg's the man who made Marlene Dietrich a star. I've heard about this house for a long time but don't think I'd seen a picture before. It was in Northridge! It looks like a modern high school to me. I expected something more glamorous.



In this shot you can see there was a moat-- I always like moats.

I just remembered Tom Wolfe once sat next to me, at Smith. He came to do a talk, and I was seated on the side front row. He was wearing a white suit even back then. He was pretty funny.

Bear Where?

We haven't seen a bear up here all summer, but lately the signs are increasing, and this is one strong bear. This is typical of what we've been seeing: 16 foot dead logs rolled several feet, with one end scooped out. All that work to eat termites.

It sometimes looks as if this bear is working only about 20 minutes ahead of us on the trail.

As I look around my little office here I realize the sad truth, I've become one of those middle aged ladies who collects bears. I'm not even going to show you a picture of this desk.

I finally finished the gigantic stack of British detective/crime novels and am rereading "Lonesome Dove." I love this book. I could barely (bearly?) tear myself away to type this.

Just learned of the 5.4 earthquake in Chino Hills. I hope it's not a foreshock earthquake, because we're heading back to L.A. on Thursday.

Wild Flowers

There are so many wonderful wildflowers at this time of year in the fields wherever we go. I ordered another copy of the Audubon flower guide since the last one went missing, and got quite caught up in reading about the parts of flowers and arrangement of leaves. I have started noticing how frequently flower petals appear as fives on a flower, so wouldn't you know when I started doing remedial playing around with Painter I drew flowers with four petals.

There's a lovely blue flower I thought was a cornflower but is flax, the same plant that linen is made of, the basis of civilization. well not exactly.

I've been reading a long list of English crime novels: mysteries, suspense, and plain old crime. I have a new favorite author among them: Ian Rankin. I read a 500 + page book of his in a day, finished it after lunch. I'm not a speed reader-- I couldn't put it down. Jayne Pilling left me with a huge summer library of this kind of novel, including four Ian Rankins. I have one Rankin left. Even though they have gold print on the cover, they are very well written.

My mother said they're remodeling Medford this summer in order to attract yuppies, and the residents are having a fit, because it's so disorienting. While she was having her hair done today a man banged through a pipe and cut off the water. She said her hairstyle survived it, but various others left with their hair sticking straight up.

We didn't see a bear today, but took another of these l o n g hikes which make us mighty sleepy hours before the sun goes down. good thing I got out last summer's crockpot and put a pot roast in it this morning. Molly came upon an elk calf in the aspen but we were able to call her off the chase.

I've been reading Elia Kazan's autobiography off and on the last few days. It seems pretty nervy to write a 900+ page autobiography, but he seems like a pretty nervy guy. When I first started it I thought it was going to be the best autobiography I'd ever read.

In between I'm reading from an incredibly tall stack of British mystery novels which Jayne Pilling left for me. She's got great taste in books, but I forgot one thing about Jayne-- she can read a novel in two hours. So I haven't put much of a dent in the books yet.

Tomorrow we're going to pick up that computer card so I can post photos. I found out it's inside a secret Fed Ex location across from the fire station, with a magnetic key underneath the tan box.

It's hard working with color on this laptop because there's so much light in the house. I really should be drawing in the closet!