Monthly Archives: March 2020

Common Sense, From The New Yorker

Don’t take it from the View, who rants and grates; take it from the New Yorker.

It may just be whistling down the empty concrete canyons of Manhattan. But this fine and persuasive piece from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, just may have a chance to find readers, with all the good-read time people suddenly find on their hands.

Common Sense like this might make the difference in New York, and New Jersey, and a bunch of very literate states, which are meant, by the founding calendar of the wizards of the ancient holy city of Philadelphia, to be pre-selecting their electoral college representatives this year. Leave us hope the remaining primaries and caucuses are not cancelled.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/reality-has-endorsed-bernie-sanders

(Though, given the mischievous malicious misgovernance on display in the past two weeks; and remembering the historical run of things; canceling this year’s election entirely, not just the primaries, is no dark horse. It’s got an even chance of being the Next Logical Step. Who, after all, except Bernie himself, would lift a finger to prevent it?

“The election this year is absolutely off the table,” I can just hear the Old Bay rasp.)

The Musonia Music School Mystery

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LOCAL COLOR DEPT.

At the north end of Valley Village, Laurel Canyon Blvd. turns into one of those cinder-block automotive/Smog Certifier/brakes-and-wheels sprawl strips that make Los Angeles the Hell of mankind’s past futurists. But just off the boulevard, Beautiful Valley Village prevails in all its quiet, Hollywood Regency romance.

Tiara Ave. is a very pretty street, one of those streets draped with the green fronds of Drake elms, the signature of LA’s mid-century rustic sophistication. But just one lot in from the fumes of the body shop on the corner, there is this unsettling anachronism, this puff of whimsy, this shimmering folly, this remnant of a film shoot that went bust; or an Utopian cult of Neo-Pythagoreans that disappeared one day in the 70s; or a Mafia front for a reefer and call-girl ring; or a flinty New Englander’s attempt to bring the music of Charles Ives to the West; or a former porn studio.

Whatever it is, here it sits, in exactly the same state of tidily clipped, faded abandonment now, as when I first found it while walking Clio some twenty ODD years ago, when we first moved here. I’ve never seen anybody go in or out, not even bassoon-case-toting Oompah-Loompahs.

For all the View’s ken, Musonia may be a world-class conservatory, a West Coast Juilliard I never heard of. Maybe at certain times of the week, there is a parade of black-silked musicians, or crowds of milling Villagers outside under the elms, dodging kids on skateboards and sipping mulled white wine while waiting for the Shostakovitch after the break, because that’s the real test.

Or is Musonia a proud consortium of Latvian gentleman songsters, with roots dating to 12th century Riga, whom Brahms once conducted, and who became established in the Valley in 1947 because of the Iron Curtain? I JUST DON’T KNOW.

One so wants the story to be beautiful and inspiring; yet one fears so much it won’t be.

Maybe that’s the definition of “mystery.”

Another Sucker Punch To The Face As The World Reels

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I know there’s no way anybody can think about or follow all the chaos; but I happened upon this in the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/27/trump-pollution-laws-epa-allows-companies-pollute-without-penalty-during-coronavirus

Corporations can now pollute freely. Seriously, an insecticide refinery, or a pig or poultry CAFO, or a nuclear power plant, can now unplug that old 1961 outflow pipe, or chop up that levee, or flip off that scrubber, and just let flow, let seep, let gas-off, free of penalty, free of fine, free of justice. Because coronavirus. And not temporary, but forever, it seems.

So add the EPA to the list: the State Department; the General Staff; the Justice Department; the Treasury; the IRS; the Federal Reserve; the U.S. dollar; the very notion of money itself; the Department of Education; the Department of the Interior; the Department of Agriculture; the National Park Service; the ICE; the CDC. You can name a dozen more, from NATO to the Post Office. All destroyed, ripped out, hollowed out, demoralized, sabotaged, de-railed, re-missioned, in limbo, savaged by cuts, captured by lobbyists, hijacked and weaponized to destroy American life. So much damage; none of it in any way principled, none of it in any way relevant or consistent, none of it in any way about real problems, none of it based on sound economic vision. Just a shrapnel bomb of bullshit, none of it in any way “conservative,” none of it about economy or about the values society; but all of it enabled by the toxic Congress of corporate pigs and a crabbed, complicit, reductionist, authoritarian judiciary.

Ya think Joe Biden – — who? where? — will fix this? Ya think he can fix this, wants to fix this, or even thinks any of this is a problem? Ya think all we need is more hands across the aisle, or “unity?” Unity in what? FOR what?

UPDATE: Right on cue, the man whose campaign slogan is “nothing shall fundamentally change,” reassures America, again, that nothing shall fundamentally change.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/30/coronavirus-exposes-deep-flaws-profit-system-biden-doubles-down-opposition-medicare

In the next four months to four years, in fact right now, the entire apparatus of the world — work, money, family, economy, wealth, health, law, transport, energy, war, agriculture, Nature, the search for God, indeed, purposeful living of any kind, is being reinvented. We all know this. Every day, in every way, civilization is a matter of personal choice.

Coronavirus has given us pause. The pause that refreshes. The election only seems to have gone away. Bernie Sanders is blacked out, but he’s out there fighting, if only you knew to go online and search for the ideas that might help save us. Democracy has only disappeared on television.

I know I’m a crazy person locked in a dark room on a sunny day. But PLEASE… are these “the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and our posterity?”

Coming Out In The Wash

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Today I went for a walk again to Tujunga Wash.

It’s close enough to meet “exercise within neighborhood” guidelines, so it’s the perfect place to get some vitamin D and socially distant exercise. (Sadly, nobody goes to look at native plants. To 99% of Angelenos, these are “the tules,” the weeds, the sticks, the scrub, the wash, the concrete canyon, the waste place. Thus to escape Angelenos, native plants are a sure resort.)

The color palette of sage scrub is about subtlety; the sophistication of grey-green.

It’s been a torrent of a spring, changeable and tempestuous, weather that is itself a fun thing just to be out in, when every winged creature is cheeping and buzzing and flapping and croaking and cawing and wheeling overhead in a Wedgwood sky. It’s been torture every day to resist going out in the weather, to see what flowers have popped.

*Phacelia calendula*, California bluebells. Only two plants, but that’s all you need to tango.

Prunus illicafolia, the holly-leaf cherry. The only cherry in the CFP. The flesh is delicious when ripe; the pits are highly nutritious, when the toxins are leached out by soaking. The pits were pounded into flour for a special kind of tortilla, or even a kind of honey-sweetened confection, like halwah.

To keep my weekly “parole” legal, focused and therefore efficient, instead of walking aimlessly, I’m planning to do a week-by-week photo-document of how this patch of scrub grows and develops through the season. Jepson couldn’t have asked for a better laboratory. In the next few weeks you can watch, with me, as Tujunga Wash Comes Out; the San Fernando Valley’s Oldest Spiring Debutante. (Ignore the concrete dress, writes Dorothy Kilgallen; Tujunga’s an Army Corps brat; but she’s got good breeding. She’s descended from Big Tujunga on one side, and Little Tujunga on the other; so there is good potential here.)

The Island snapdragon, native to the Channel Islands. Galvezia speciosa. Hummingbird, bee attractor.

Smog-free skies have contributed to this very robust growth. Pollution is even more toxic to the CFP than it is to traditional North American landscapes, so this is a good spring to monitor a smog-free bloom (we hope, the first of many.) Below, the lupines are going crazy; lupines and cholla and sunflowers? What an amazing habitat.

The spring’s sole, bellwether, buckwheat flower…

We just had a week of record rainfall. too. But even with the sparkling air and the Midas touch of sunshine, this biome feels like it has found its feet at last; that individual plants are at last working together, merging into that emergent organism, the aromatic, wildlife-attracting, self-evolving scrub.