I Hate L.A.!

Hate New York City, it’s cold and it’s damp…

Who didn’t enjoy the “cold open” to the 2013 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony? It happened a few weeks ago, but HBO preemed it to the nation late last month. In the midst of La-La Land, where the remaining top-down portion of the music business truly resides (sorry, Clive), Randy Newman tickled the ivories and teased about my town. By the time “Rand” acquired tempo, there were Tom Petty, Jackson Browne and John Fogerty standing up there with him, ready to help blast out the lyrics to a ditty so rockin and ultra-ironic that it almost got voted the official song of Los Angeles, however it is you do that. However…

[LITTLE SANTA MONICA?!]

Muchacho, I hate L.A.!

Now, I have some perfectly rational friends, lovely people all, who live and even thrive in La-La. Henry Kline. Bill Fitzhugh. Ben Schafer. Laura Kightlinger. Bob Crais. Paul Lance. Dan Moran and Amy Stout. Harlan Ellison. (Not two hours after I typed that last name, the phone rang and it was Harlan calling out of the blue, no particular reason, just to chat, hadn’t spoken to him in a couple years. Cue the TWILIGHT ZONE guitarist – but, Mr. Serling, sir, isn’t the time difference three hours?) Probably Tia Maggini too, only I’m not sure if she’s still out there. Blah blah blah, yes, it’s exciting and all. But if I knew I had to remain in the SoCal megalopolis for all time, I’d probably…was gonna say go postal, but I don’t think I could even fetch up that much bile: I’d just sob myself to sleep every night and hope I wouldn’t wake up. (Harlan has called NYC an “abbatoir,” so I don’t think I’m being all that unkind here. Let’s face it, he’s a master: c.f., “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.”)

I like lots of stuff in L.A., tons of it. The Sunset Strip. The Hollywood Bowl. The Capitol Records building. Griffith Park. The HOLLYWOODLAND sign. The Groundlings. Grauman’s Mann’s TCL Chinese Theatre. In-N-Out Burgers. The Tar Pits. Spago. Ellison Wonderland, the interior of which is probably the single most long-fusingly dazzling sight I’ve yet beheld out there. (In fairness, I never made it to the Ackermansion, though Bob Crais offered to take me; somehow the timing didn’t work out.) Chico, I even like riding over the trees on the monorail to Disneyland and registering the famous castle from tv, up close and personal, imagining Tink setting off her sexy fireworks. Makes me sniffle just remembering one glorious temperate summer night, and Disney *World* just isn’t the same, never was, never will be. That pale imitation is more like…ummmm…riding in a tram to make you think you’re seeing the real thing, like on a studio tour.

What I don’t like, the dealbreaker of all dealbreakers, is the irritation – bordering on humiliation – of living in a place where anything you really want to do is so tantalizingly close but out of reach, unless you can game the freeways. That stupid SNL sketch “The Californians,” the one where the airheads all explain their driving routes, is closer to the truth than you realize, non-Angelenos! One of my L.A. pals once told me about driving to a Hollywood Bowl concert to which s/he HELD A FRICKIN TICKET, but couldn’t get there due to a traffic jam. CRYIN while sittin one mile from the Bowl on the Hollywood Freeway doing 00.00mph. After leavin an hour early!

One time I flew into town, rented my car, fought freeways to my hotel at Century City. (20^th Century-Fox was HarperCollins’s sister company.) I wanted to visit my beloved author Bill Fitzhugh at his home in Woodland Hills. He said, come on over, we’ll whomp you up some vittles! I said, OK, what should I do? And he gave me the same kind of directions those silly Californians do on SNL, only he was serious! SO serious that I arrived within :10 of his predicted ETA, which included two bottlenecks on the way, which he’d already frickin PLANNED FOR! Now, I did get to see my old Jackson, MS droogie Victor Hawkins in person, and that huge surprise was worth the whole drive out to BF’s crib and back, but still. If I want to navigate an entire metroplex just to see a movie, I can stay in Phoenix with my father-in-law. (Same deal to get to Harlan’s: he carefully told me exactly what I would encounter all along the way, I did, and by the time I got to the legendary DIG. OR SPLIT. warning, I was so thankful to be alive that I almost crawled out of my car.)

My first view of the Holy Land was in 1974 or so. Patty Faralla, a music-biz publicist, offered me an interview (guess which of the following actually made print) if I’d just come out there and do the circuit, I could write whatever I heard. I wound up very busy. I interviewed Neil Bogart, who was marketing the second Kiss album and a Johnny Carson audio retrospective; Larry Harris, his Number Two, who was hipping me about why “Casablanca” Records also did “metal” and such; and Bill, Mark and Brett Hudson, the Hudson Brothers, Bill of which is Kate’s father. The Hudsons interview went great (clearly why I’d been brought out there in the first place; Casablanca obviously paid for it all), and I loved it: these boys presented themselves comedically as sharp as the Marxes, but they were all Harpo/Chicos; i.e., pretty good 70s-era musicians. But the magazine which I wrote it for rejected it: they said it sounded too much like I’d simply transcribed my audio tape. [Not frickin so, boys, but] OK, said I, and about two months later Rolling Stone published a Hudsons piece almost identically styled, but by then my former bosses’ mag had already been deep-sixed. I wasn’t mad at all, except for no more checks. However, rejected: a pretty funny piece, carefully crafted by me, on the Hudson Brothers. Yet, absurdly as events later proved, published by me a couple weeks later in Rolling Stone: Neil Bogart on Johnny Carson, which album turned out to be the most ignominious flop in Neil’s truncated career. So I was able to use a Los Angeles dateline for the first and only time in my life, but thus did the City of Angels vanish into ephemera in my own noggin.

Chip on my shoulder? Nope, I maintain it had nothing to do with who was publishing my stuff. I learned how to play backgammon on that trip, I’ll give L.A. that. But what I’ll never forget was that Patty planned to make dinner for five or six of us. OK. So I rode shotgun in her car as she stopped five, six, seven times to get all the foodstuffs she wanted. There was a bread store. An herb store. A meat store. A produce store. I couldn’t believe it. It took her seven or eight stops, burned up an eighth-tank of gas, to get what I could score in an Athens, GA supermarket in fifteen minutes. I said to myself then and there, I’m sorry but I absolutely said it to myself, bad as it may have been at that moment, still I said to myself back in 1974, I love Patty and Neil and the Hudsons and Larry’s, er, um, hospitality and all, but mate, I hate L.A.!

Once my friend Doug Ross and I were in Las Vegas, at the Venetian Hotel. We had tickets to the Penn & Teller show at the Rio. We walked out front and could see the Rio jutting out of the darkness, tantalizingly near. Doug had the good sense to ask the doorman, who was hailing taxis, if we could walk there, with a whole hour to spare. The guy looked at us like we were the Jed Clampett family. “Get in a taxi!” We soon realized that traversing that simple, maybe mile, required lots of massive-highway turns – it was actually quite a substantial trip – and if we’d been dim enough to attempt walking, we’d NEVER have made it. So, yes, Vegas does indeed suck, but friends, Los Angeles is this, quadruplicated.

People say, you grew up in the Deep South, so why are you so sweaty at summertime, heh heh, you should be used to it. Angelenos have evolved chitinous coverages called cars in order to get used to their spread-frickin-out city. I don’t want that. Every time I go to L.A. to visit a good friend, part of Iron Man’s uniform has to snap into place, unbidden and unwanted. I actually crave my own town’s shit & squalor as a detox agent. But frickin La-La? Fuggeddabboudit!

9/2/13: An opposing view, in an entertaining piece from Buzzfeed.

9/3/13: And then, of course, there’s this.

Kristmas Kamping

We spent Christmas at a KOA campground owned by my sister (in-law, but heck, she’s still my sis) Roz

My sister Roz is the best hostess ever.

and her husband Cal

Cal is cutting homemade pizza into slices. Does it *get* any better?

in the Colorado Desert near Niland, California. They call it “camping with a K,” and we had a nice cabin with indoor plumbing: my kind of kamping! We’d driven Linda’s dad all the way from Phoenix (4:15 without stopping, but we do stop…), and we’d enjoyed both the staff Christmas Eve party, and Christmas Day dinner, a spectacular service of ham, yam, taters, the best dinner rolls you’ve ever had, etc. If this is camping, I’m all for it! (Of course, the campground exists so that big recreational vehicles can stop, park, juice up, and – in this case at least – have a superb restaurant meal. Some people even live there.)

The Glamis North KOA is situated very close to, but not too close to, the famous Glamis sand dunes, where far too many drunk people roar over unscouted territory, pretending they’re BULLITT stunt drivers, in All-Terrain Vehicles. The Glamis North folks like their ATVs too, but they prefer to head out into the desert to explore. We did it ourselves last year. It’s tremendous fun.

My bride waiting to blast off, last year. Take it from me: it’s FUN!

Linda’s dad can’t ATV these days, so we asked our hosts to send us on a driving trip. Easy, they said: go to Slab City and Salvation Mountain! They asked us, “Have you seen INTO THE WILD?” And of course we had, but we’d never pegged the real locations. Slab City is the “last free place on Earth,” the concrete foundation of an abandoned WWII Marine barracks. There is no electricity, no water, no nothing. And no charge for any of this nothingness. So, well-off “snowbirds” park their RVs alongside impoverished squatters.

You get to Salvation Mountain just before Slab City. It was painted by a guy who loves his Jesus. His name is Leonard Knight, and that previous sentence doesn’t even begin to describe the ardor with which he has dressed this place. I went down and talked to him.

Leonard Knight, who painted the mountain and everything else within reach.

Let’s try some pix:

Deep inside the works.

See if you can’t divine your own personal New Year’s message from these shots.

Everything he can see, he paints.

It’s up to you.

Man: that’s dedication.

However you receive these heartfelt sentiments, please accept my very best wishes for a happy and prosperous 2011.

Everything’s Coming Up Rosé

Summer’s here — at least in New York it is! — and for me the season is the color of rosé wine. I’m not talking about the horrid Mateus that we all used to drink back in the days of candlewax dripping down fiasco-shaped bottles of cheap Chanti. I mean lighter, drier bottles that suggest a break from the heavy red wines of the rest of the year, but are every bit as refreshing as a Chard or Sauv Blanc – in fact, even more so, because the taste is unexpected. It’s like drinking flower petals, and you don’t have to pay a fortune to do it. The New York Times’s wine columnist, Eric Asimov, even extolled rosé’s virtues recently.

The girls are checking out what everybody else is having. Doug’s digging the wine list. I’m about to order rose.

Most people my age turn their noses up at rosé, probably because of that too-sweet Mateus experience (it was so popular in North America that in its heyday, Mateus accounted for more than a third of Portugal’s wine export business). So it was that, during a vacation on the French Riviera (hey, we had a free place to stay!) with our dear friends Doug and Kathie Ross – winelovers supreme – at a sun-drenched but wonderfully temperate lunch outside by the seashore, I surprised them by suggesting we order rosé. It turned out to be perfect, and that lunch remains one of my most treasured memories: I can’t crack open a bottle of rosé now without thinking of Doug and Kathie, who were skeptical at first. “Bottled poetry” is like that: you make lifelong connections, just like you do with a favorite song.

A typical spread on the terrace. Everything you see, including wine, was bought on the fly.

There was a terrace outside our apartment in Monte Carlo. During the days we’d explore (one day we rented a car and Doug negotiated the stick shift around hairpin turns that would have challenged James Bond; of course, we weren’t going 100km/h), but we tried to make it back for mid-afternoon. We sat out on that terrace for hours, watching the sun set, talking about cabbages and kings, and enjoying cold cuts, fruit and cheese, and lots of wine, imbibed over so many hours that I never became intoxicated with anything but the magnificent setting. The others felt the same way. Over food, friends and the grape, we were only pretending to be Europeans. But it was so much fun.

Jamaica Farewell

I don’t remember exactly when we started traveling to Jamaica, but it’s been well over ten years. We go to the same place every year and do the same things: we read books, solve crossword puzzles, eat home-cooked Jamaican food, and laze by the Caribbean water, even bluer than my bride’s eyes. Boring? Maybe, to many – some of them including friends and even blood relatives. But not to us. Whenever we have time, we try to take two vacations a year. One of them is educational, but our Jamaica trip is always vegetational.

I’ve especially enjoyed reading longer books there, since I can spend huge chunks of uninterrupted time plowing through them. I read CRYPTONOMICON by Neal Stephenson in Ja; Edmund Morris’s fascinating “memoir” of Ronald Reagan, DUTCH; the entire DARK TOWER cycle by Stephen King; etc. I also delight in bringing down with me “beach reads,” usually disposable novels (Judith Krantz, Dan Brown, any number of wannabe horror or thriller writers), and leaving them there for the next guests. (Don’t get me wrong: I leave good books there too, including all the DARK TOWER paperbacks.) The one and only disadvantage to owning a Kindle (inaugurated on our 2008 trip) is that, when the wind is blowing sand around on the beach, Amazon’s device is a grain collector. It didn’t happen this year, and Linda read THE HELP on the beach with no problem, but I always take some paper down, just in case.

We stay at Jamahome, a villa at Silver Sands, near Duncans in Trelawny Parish on Jamaica’s north shore, about halfway between Montego Bay, where the airport is, and Ocho Rios, where most of the cruise ships dock. I guess you could say Silver Sands is a “gated community,” but it’s a one-plank railroad-style gate that the guard raises by hand as s/he waves you through. We come just before the high season starts, so it’s nice and thinly populated, just the way we like it.

The view from our back yard.

We have the house to ourselves. Claudette Graham, our hostess, housekeeper and chef (and, by now, close personal friend) comes in at 8:30 or so, makes us a hearty breakfast, and scoots us off to the white-sand beach (thus the name of the community), a five-minute walk. About one or two, we repair back home for “tea” (for me, it’s always a Red Stripe, the sweet, delicious Jamaican lager) and crustless sandwich quarters. After we’ve showered away most of the day’s sand granules, our hostess leaves us long before dark, with dinner warming in the oven. It’s prepared for us to serve family-style, by an off-the-scale island cook: spicy jerk chicken or snapper, lobster caught that very morning, sometimes meat in the form of balls, loaf or steaks. If we’re lucky, for breakfast we have ackee (a tree-borne fruit which looks and chews more like hard-scrambled eggs) with bacon, onions and peppers, but we also might have unbelievably good banana pancakes, or French toast, cheese omelets, etc. There are always veggies and fruit for dietetic balance. Back home, we’ve tried to replicate “jerk” sauce and the ping-pong-ball-sized rolls of “johnnycake” that go along with ackee. We each congratulated the other for trying – me with the rolls, Linda with the jerk chicken – and never, never attempted it again. The precise mix of spices, the exact way you prepare the johnnycake, is something you pass down from generation to generation. We can only consume and applaud. We’ve turned up our noses only once, at a coveted island delicacy: curried goat. We asked Erron, Claudette’s husband, what her very best dish was, and he answered without hesitation, but that night we decided you have to be Jamaican to love curried goat.

Claudette in her domain. The best cook we know personally.

At the house, we sit in a screened-in sunroom that looks out upon the ocean, just past a glorious tree which our hostess calls “sea cotton.” In the morning (I’m usually the earlier riser), I can usually see a cruise ship in the distance heading east to dock at Ocho, and, when day is done, a well-lit one (in all senses of the word) sailing back west. These toy ships — from experience, I know how immense they really are — seem to take forever to cross the perimeter. Watching one at night, usually nursing a cigar outside on the patio, I remind myself that two types of vision casually illustrate how insignificant we self-absorbed humans really are: some eyes are trained on the ocean, others study the stars. From my position, I can see them both. Oceanographers and astronomers must share an occasional feeling of tininess.

We’re basically homebodies; it’s pathetic. One year we got Erron to drive us to the spectacular Duns River Falls, and that was fun. But it’s hard to move us once we get settled in. Every summer, when we start fantasizing about the upcoming trip, we say, “This year, we’re going to Bob Marley’s house!” But we never do. There are restaurants around, too, but why?

The sun room. The frenzied partying is OFF THE FRICKIN HIZZOOK when the DUPREES roll up in here, yo!

Jamaica became a British colony in the mid-17^th century (it was seized from the Spaniards at gunpoint), and only gained full independence in 1962. But three centuries of colonial influence have left their mark. You drive on the left side of the road. Cricket is universally popular (the “Windies,” taken from all over the Caribbean, are one of the world’s best teams). Every letter to the editor of Kingston’s daily Gleaner begins, “The EDITOR, Sir:” and ends, “I am, etc.” But what strikes you again and again is that Jamaican home-style (as opposed to hotel) living feels like the U.S. in the Forties or Fifties, that time to which the Christian right keeps wanting to turn back the clock.

The dining room. Doesn’t it look like it came from another time?

Jamaicans are not wealthy in the per capita calculation, but neither are they stupid or indolent. Their largest industry is tourism, and they are gracious and gentle hosts. There are more English-speaking people in Jamaica than anywhere else in North America except the U.S. and Canada, and when they are addressing guests, they use that mellifluous Caribbean lilt on the Queen’s English. But when they’re talking to each other, they speak in an English hybrid you can’t understand, called “patwa,” Ja for patois. You’d recognize some of the conventions if you’ve ever read a reggae lyric, but they are going a mile a minute and it’s simply unintelligible to off-island ears. I rode with Erron into Falmouth one day to help him tote a repaired television set back to the house, and I heard him talk with friends, the repairman, and people on the street. I have no idea what anybody said – for all I know, they were riffing on me.

The beach at Silver Sands.

When we first visited Jamaica, the van journey from MoBay was tooth-rattling: about 45 kilometers over a pockmarked dirt road that forced us to creep through Falmouth’s town center. But very gradually, over many years, a paved highway was carved and completed. Now the trip is at least 25% shorter, but it makes you much sadder.

Each year, the road out from the airport has two or three new, massive luxury resort complexes under construction. This one’s being built by Spaniards. That one by the Japanese. And so on. It won’t be long before the entire strip looks like Cancun, or like Negril on the western shore – one resort hotel after another. I’m told that the hotels tend to serve comfort food to their own countrymen: forget the curried goat. This has nothing to do with our continuing experience at Jamahome — it’s only an outsider’s observation — but one year we were stuck overnight in MoBay by a huge rainstorm that grounded all planes. At the hotel where the airline put us up, the buffet breakfast included “ackee,” but it bore very little resemblance to Claudette’s dish, and our disappointment bordered on depression.

Not all change is bad. When we first started going, we had to ask Claudette to call the phone company for a line back to the States. Now our cell phones work fine, and there’s a wireless router in the villa, so we can email to our hearts’ content on a broadband connection. But something is gradually disappearing. Last year, a greedy developer tried to annex a popular public beach used by the locals up in the hills. They got some pro bono legal counsel, sued, and won. Yes, tourism brings sorely needed jobs and tax revenues, but this was their beach! I wonder how much longer they can hold out.

Falmouth itself is being built up near the shore: there’s a development called “New Falmouth,” and that pretty much tells the tale. A couple of years ago, they unveiled the Trelawny Multi-Purpose Stadium, with the most beautiful cricket pitch I’d ever seen (Erron stopped by on the way in to let us look at the stadium). It was one of the venues when the West Indies hosted the 2007 Cricket World Cup. And now we learn that Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines has elected, starting next year, to dock at Falmouth instead of Ocho. It’s a far cry from rumbling through town for a TV set, and maybe even an improvement, but Falmouth – and the whole of Trelawny Parish — will never be the same.

An ugly American, but with no problems, mon.

I realize I have a lot of nerve railing about some sainted old Jamaica that I never actually knew, since I’m one of those tourists myself. But I can still conjure up a wisp of nostalgia for that Fifties sense of propriety and grace that makes our quiet community so charming and restful. I mean, the rooms in the villa look like my grandma’s house, storm lanterns and all, but I’m nevertheless tapping away at Google News. I’m part of the change, and I don’t always like it. Is this how you become a conservative?