Periodization.

 

This will be a short post because I am a little behind schedule this morning because I had to shave my head this morning because even though I usually do that on Sundays, I couldn’t yesterday because I was working.

That’s life, right? Because … because … because …

Just a long series of interrelated events. I’ve always felt that the way Americans learn history in school is kind of misleading because the study of history relies on a concept called “Periodization” which basically just means that we slice history up into nice little clean segmented pieces. You have the fall of the Western Roman Empire and then that chapter ends and a new one starts called “The Dark Ages” and then that chapter ends and you have one called “The Renaissance” and then that chapter ends and you have one called “The Enlightenment” and then that chapter ends … and so on, even though that’s not really how any of that happened. It erases the messy and overlapping parts about because and because and because. By the way, the Dark Ages never happened and the Renaissance also kind of didn’t, but we don’t have time for that.

Anyway, later today I will get my second Covid vaccination and I’m very excited about it. A couple of weeks from now I will (hopefully) be at the beginning of a slightly new version of this life. It will take awhile before the difference will be noticeable, because I’m still going to mostly social distance and will still wear a mask because I am trying to be a responsible person because I think that in a society we do actually have a responsibility to one another because if that isn’t true, then what are we even doing?

Soon I will be able to take a deep breath for the first time in 13 months because I will be vaccinated. Soon you will be able to say that too because you will be vaccinated. And then we will all be able to take a deep breath and look around at the world we return to and maybe we will do a better job with it this time … because we came so close to losing it.

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An Entirely Subjective History of Los Angeles .

The best metaphor for understanding the way in which modern Los Angeles has grown is the metaphor of cancer.

If cancer is, at its simplest, just the rampant and uncontrollable division of mutated cells, then remember that Los Angeles, in its pre-mutation form, began more than a thousand years ago when the Tongva people gave it a name: Iyaanga. It means something along the lines of, “place of poison oak”. Some people who know about these things believe that the Tongva actually descended from tribes out of Nevada which migrated to the coast of southern California fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, or roughly the same time that Cecrops I was founding Athens. There is some evidence that the Tongva forced out a different prehistoric tribe which had been in the area for six thousand years before that, grinding grain at the base of the San Gabriel mountains while farming was only beginning to take place in the Nile River Valley. So who can really say where a cancer starts? Maybe it is always just a latent memory.

When the Spanish ships arrived in 1542, they were greeted by the Tongva’s ocean-going, twelve-man canoes. The sturdiness of those canoes was attributable to three thousand years of experiments in engineering and also to the thick black pitch from the La Brea Tar Pits, which today have a gift shop.

It was the Spanish who named the place El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio de Porciuncula, which means something like “The Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels of the Porciuncula River”. By that name, of course, they were referring to the LA River which is now a dry chasm of concrete. The Spanish built missions and cleared ranch land, and little changed even when it passed to Mexican control, Mexico was still called New Spain in 1821. A blurry and sometimes bloody twenty-six years passed with little changing but politics and loyalties. The United States took control of the whole place on January 13, 1847 with a military treaty signed at the Campo de Cahuenga, which still exists. It is across the street from the Universal Studios movie-themed amusement park. Both Universal Studios and the Campo de Cahuenga have gift shops.

There are two changes which are generally indicative of the cellular mutations that cause cancer: the unchecked multiplication of cells and the diversion of blood flow required to feed that malignant cluster.

In 1892 oil was discovered 460 feet below what is now the corner of Colton Street and Glendale Boulevard, less than a mile from the present site of Dodger Stadium, which has a gift shop. The resulting oil boom and its concurrence with the waning days of the California Gold Rush caused the population of Los Angeles to multiply until it had swelled to more than one hundred thousand by 1900. The resulting pressure on the city’s water supply became manifest in the Federal legislation which created the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which would, over time, drain the Owens Valley dry. That same legislation gave Los Angeles access to the aquifer below the San Fernando Valley, over the hill the north. Provisions of that legislation prevented the City of Los Angeles from selling that water back to the farmers who grew wheat and grapes and citrus fruit in the Valley, because they were not within the city limits. Quickly the little farm towns which sat at the bottom of the 260 square mile bowl of the San Fernando Valley begged to be annexed into the jurisdiction of the City of Los Angeles. With the economic and population booms that followed World War II, LA needed somewhere to keep its people, having already filled its own space. The San Fernando Valley was ripe for suburban sprawl as it was already connected to the Los Angeles Basin by a natural gorge through the Santa Monica Mountains called the Sepulveda Pass. In 1957 construction began on the 405 Freeway which would forever forward link LA to the Valley like a hardened artery. Nested atop the southern edge of the Pass, above the freeway and looking south to Downtown and West to the Pacific Ocean, sits the Getty Center which gleams white like a mirage when the sun is out. It has a gift shop. Through the 1950s nearly all of the Valley farmland was concreted over to make space for a shockingly inefficient grid system of streets and for subdivisions of single-family homes which were built with the same energy and interchangeability of parts which had so recently served the war effort to such great success. There are still a few tiny ghettos of citrus farmland in the modern Valley. Tourist brochures refer to them as open air museum groves. One of them is a small stand of orange trees on the campus of California State University Northridge, it is located on the south side of campus along Nordhoff Street across from a gas station and a Cupid’s Hot dog stand. The hot dog stand does not have a gift shop but the CSUN bookstore sells all manner of branded commemorative trinkets.

The direct connection a tumor establishes to the bloodstream provides it with more than just a means of sustenance, it also creates a highway through which mutated cells may travel through the rest of the body.

Portions of the population looking to escape the suburban sprawl of the San Fernando Valley moved north over the Santa Susanna Mountains into the Santa Clarita Valley, which was formerly notable only for the Newhall Pass through which the Southern Pacific Railroad moved its trains between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and for the 262 acre Six Flags Magic Mountain roller coaster amusement park built there in 1971. The amusement park offers numerous gift shops. Other population booms have occurred to the west in the Santa Clara River Valley along State Route 126, where citrus and fruit farmland has been rezoned to serve the expansions of Santa Paula and Fillmore. Further to the northeast, population expansion has metastasized into the Antelope Valley which is a desolate high desert of more than two thousand square miles named for the pronghorned deer-like animals - unrelated to but resembling eurasian antelopes - which lived there until being hunted out of existence in 1888. Most of the Antelope Valley grows little food and possesses even less water.

Cancerous cells which leave their initial cluster and spread throughout the body can eventually form their own new clusters in new locations through the perversion of the natural process of angiogenesis, thereby allowing the new clusters to begin siphoning off blood supply on their own.

Population growth in the Antelope Valley has depleted the existing ground water aquifer to such a degree that land subsidence has begun to occur, whereby the ground level itself is dropping. From it’s main population centers of Palmdale and Lancaster, it is impossible to see across the desert and mountains back down into the cancerous cluster that is Los Angeles, but the fragility of the very ground there is indicative enough of its presence.

Left untreated, virtually all cancer is terminal.


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(An earlier version of this piece was published in the Fall 2014 issue of The Northridge Review)

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The 6th Sense is Actually Proprioception.

Recently the movie Glass hit theaters and while I personally do not watch M. Night Shyamalan movies because, with the possible exception of The Sixth Sense, they are not — you know — good, I did for a brief moment, when I heard that there was film called “Glass”, entertain the charming and wistful notion that it might be a documentary about the history of glass.

Boil me up some fake movie theater butter because THAT is something I would pay to go see!

I can already hear you shouting, “Now wait just one minute sir, Signs was a damn good movie!”

But here’s the thing: No. No it was not.

As I recall, there is a scene in that movie when Joaquin Phoenix beats an alien to death with a baseball bat. That’s dumb.

Also, if I recall correctly, that scene is shot in such a way that you only see the beating of the alien with a baseball bat in the reflection on a TV. You know why it is shot that way??? Because the premise of the scene is dumb. And the movie KNOWS IT! That is why it is shot that way. It’s like that scene in the second Matrix movie when Laurence Fishburne is fighting somebody on the top of a moving semi truck and for some reason he does a handstand on the edge of the trailer in the middle of the fight and the logical next shot would be a wide shot so the audience can see what is happening, but instead they go to a super tight shot on his face because everyone involved with the making of that movie understood that the premise of the entire moment was so unbelievably stupid that is was basically insulting to the audience.

Anyway.

Glass has a fascinating history and while I am not going to even attempt to explicate here all of the ways in which you should find it interesting, I will just share this one nugget of ensorcelling glass-related information:

Beginning in the 13th Century, the water-treading, lagoon-locked city-state of Venice (in what is now the nation of Italy) sequestered all of its glass production and its glass makers and their families on the island of Murano, about a mile outside of the city. This was done to prevent the spread of the technology of glass blowing. Much like gunpowder, silk, and pasta (which is Chinese), glass production was once a closely guarded secret. Glass makers were not allowed to leave the island without permission from the government and if they did, they could be killed.

It’s like if the Manhattan Project was taking place on Ellis Island so New York City could keep a watchful eye over it.

Are you telling me that you would not be interested in watching a documentary about that? Because I sure as hell would. See? Glass is interesting! And I have not even told you yet about Depression Glass! But I will save that for another time.


*** Be sure to tune in next week for our report investigating why Mel Gibson is still being allowed to make movies! ***

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Food Court.

I submit to you that the atomic bomb and the food court are the two most American inventions that will ever be.

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Salty History.

I just started reading the exact sort of book that I like. It is called “Salt” written by the very talented Mister Mark Kurlansky. It is actually called, “Salt; A World History” and it is about salt. Until about a hundred or so years ago people did not know that salt could be found LITERALLY everywhere, so there were great and busy efforts made to control the small known supplies of this life-sustaining stuff that also made our food taste better.

Well I am only about fifty pages in, but I was reading those fifty pages just now while eating lunch at the local Mexican place and drinking a margarita, so I now feel that I am qualified to give an entire college lecture about the history of salt. I will spare you this lecture, but would like to recount one story that I just read that (while seemingly unrelated to salt) is very, very funny.

The ancient Chinese empire first learned of the Romans (and by extension, the entire Western world) around 139B.C..  The Chinese emperor Wudi had sent an envoy called Zhang Qian off to the mysterious west in order to find allies. Well it took Zhang about six years but finally he reached an outlying Roman outpost in modern Turkistan. Well Zhang got all freaked out at what a fairly advanced civilization he found there. So he rushed home (it took him another 6 years to get back) and reported that an advanced civilization existed out west. Well an army was dispatched to conquer this newly discovered threat on the western front (took them another 6 years to get there, because apparently Odysseus was the most talented navigator of the ancient world and it took HIM ten years to sail from Turkey to Greece [sorry, that is a bitter jab that no one will ever get unless they are 1) an English major and 2) remotely familiar with the geography of the Mediterranean {which no English majors are}]).

So this Chinese army arrives in Turkistan around 102 B.C. and defeats the Roman outpost, then hangs out for a couple years, defeats the outpost again and then heads home (takes another 6 years to get back because they don’t have GPS) and then triumphantly announce that they have conquered the Roman Empire, because as far as they knew, they had.

Well in the intervening couple of decades between when the Chinese learned of Rome and when they “conquered” Rome, the actual Roman Empire had fallen to Germanic invaders, so into the modern era, there were descendants of the Wudi emperor who believed that they had – in point of fact – conquered Rome, never having known that Rome was an actual place a few hundred miles further west than their army had ever gone.

And I think that is funny.

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History is Still Happening.

The other day I had one of those wonderful experiences where I went to the library and checked out SO MUCH STUFF that I left gleefully feeling like I had robbed the joint.




You may recall that I haven’t been able to do that I awhile and of course that’s because I, kinda-sorta, owed the Los Angeles County Public Library system like sixty bucks and I really didn’t want to pay it.



Well, enter stage left: Divine Providence!



See, I live in Santa Clarita California, which is a somewhat uppity burb of LA, and the city up and decided awhile ago that it wanted (and deserved!) its own library system. So a hearty thank you goes out to the City of Santa Clarita Public Library for wiping my slate clean!



So for nary a penny I was able to check out eight CDS (which I will totally not be burning into my iTunes) and six books (one on digital photography, two books of poetry, an illustrated memoir, a book about the carbon footprint of everything [from swimming pools and grocery store bananas to text messages and walking through a doorway] and a book of essays).



I was so happy!



Then I was made even happier as I read Sarah Vowell’s essay , “God Will Give You Blood to Drink in a Souvenir Shot Glass” in her book “The Partly Cloudy Patriot”. If you have never heard her on NPR or seen her on the Daily Show, Vowell is “droll” and “intelligent”, or so says the blurb on the cover of the book. It turns out that what she actually is, is gloomier than I am and even more obsessed with the minutia of history. Toward the end of the “Blood” essay she wrote the passage below, which articulates better than I ever have been able to, the way in which history is not a class you’re forced to take, but rather an endless story that you and I and everyone we know is participating in.



Here is what she had to say about it:



The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey caffe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle’s Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much.



It had never before occurred to me to try and high-five a book before, but I considered it after I read that.

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