Monthly Archives: August 2018

Moonlit courtyard, with koi pond and bonsais, at Yamashiro in Hollywood.

The 1914 building was built by the Bernheimer Brothers, German-Jewish dealers in Oriental art. Wanting a traditional shogun’s hilltop palace to display their collection, the brothers imported scores of Japanese builders, craftsmen and artists, and housed them in tents on the hillside above Franklin. “When All This Was Farmland.”

(One wonders: did these artists and builders, who probably spoke no English, ever get a chance to stroll down to Highland, and hop on a Red Car to explore Southern California? Did any of them settle in Hollywood? It’s interesting to imagine that they might have; and that maybe one or two of them may have written about their experience.) 

Perched in a hillside pagoda in the Yamashiro gardens, Buddha gazes out over Hollywood, laughing himself silly at the folly he sees below.

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Happy 76th Birthday, Janet! 

To celebrate, we went to Yamashiro, the venerable and festive landmark restaurant in the Hollywood Hills. The building itself (”Mountain Palace”) is a work of art, inside and out. The grounds offer magnificent gardens with an incomparable view, looking out over the neon buzz of Hollywood and the LA streetlights spreading like a glistening sea. We enjoyed a lovely fusion dinner with sake, and had a dreamy, elegant time. Janet even got to blow out a candle and make her wish, over a surprise complimentary dessert.

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SOMEWHERE ELSE

Civilization is improving! Shenzhen is FINALLY finished and ready for the big-spending new, rich citizens to move in. Soon, all the unsightly worker-citizens, those who built the city from a fishing village, will be cashiered and bused away from their homes, to pick up whatever worn threads of their tatterdemalion lives they can in a strange housing project, itself just being completed, Somewhere Else. (I’m sure whatever Somewhere Else they are shipped to, will be very nice and will feel “just like home,” – that is, block after demoralizing block of steel-and-stucco boxes. Only without the shabby clutter of friends, family, ancestral habitations, business ties, memories, songs, stories or shrines.)

As the last obsolete poor, with their smelly cooking and their funny accents, get managed away, Shenzhen will finally be free to attract the affluent citizens it deserves: the new hipster-citizens who are “global” and “connected”, meaning, they own a cell phone, and already have a job or an income from Somewhere Else. Just imagine: a city of people from Somewhere Else, people who already have plenty of their own money from Somewhere Else to spend. A city imported from Somewhere Else, containing nothing but gleaming towers, mile after mile of them, thousands of floors, each floor bursting with identical, flip-able luxury condos with un-openable windows and acres of underground parking. And no noisy, distracting commerce or businesses littering the streets, to drag down the curb appeal of your investment in downtown Somewhere Else – er, Shenzhen.

Hundreds of thousands displaced as Shenzhen ‘upgrades’ its urban villages