Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
First an excellent editorial from the Guardian on why the Brexit bait-and-switch is, for the nation as a whole, disastrously unsound. It explains the effects of economic rent (whence the term rentier) and the difference between a productive or producers’ economy and arentier economy(whence the game Monopoly). The working and middle classes aren’t nodding for Brexit — their heads are just jerking and bouncing at the ends of taut nooses, slipped around their necks by 250 years of Tories. Since Thatcher, their flailing feet don’t even touch the ground.
“Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in 1852 that “the Tories in England long fancied that they were in raptures about royalty, the church and the beauties of the ancient constitution, until a time of trial tore from them the confession that they were only in raptures about rent”. His assessment of early 19th-century Tories applies with unerring accuracy to today’s Conservatives.”
— Thus Spake The Guardian, December 27, 2020. Mirabile dictu, the Guardian is quoting Karl Marx!
Yes, BoJo did cut a deal on fish give-backs, and EU fishers will only have to give back 25% of the fish they’ve caught in British waters. (One assumes — hopes? — that is means a digital credit/debit arrangement, not a schlepp-the-fish-back -and-forth from one port to another arrangement.) That leaves them 75% of their catch. British fishwives are out already, hands flared around their mouths, calling salty oaths around BoJo’s cave-in. In a surprise rip-current, Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon hails the deal and downplays Caledonian grousing. Seems she’s much more slippery on Scottish independence than her retired mentor, Mr. Salmond, was; but she’s in power, and he isn’t. But in England, the fisherfolk are throwing harpoons at Bojo:
I knew “The Shoals of Herring” as beautifully covered by the Corries; but here is the Songwriter Himself, Ewan MacColl, hypnotically chanting a distillation of the lives of thousands of men who lived on the sea. The Victorian herring fleet out of Great Yarmouth was one of the industrial wonders of the world. It makes a fascinating counterpart to “The Song o the Fishgutters” from the previous blog: they were, of course, the girls in the packing plants on shore in “Yermouth toun.” Hairk:
The Bard of Prestonpans, Davy Steele, sings his great Fareweel tae the Fishin’.
Hear the delightfully incomprehensible ’10 Dreg Song.” I couldn’t find the lyrics, but I did find a whole website about “Dreg Songs!” In the nineteenth century, Scotsmen fished for oysters in the Firth of Forth by dragging dredges over the oyster ‘scalps’. To maintain a steady speed they sang as they rowed. Overfishing brought the industry to a close near the turn of the twentieth century and with it, the use of the dreg songs. For years the songs were hidden away – lost.… Read more below!!
Don’t miss clicking on the video, if you missed it last year when I first posted it. This may be a rare record of the of King of Merry-Go-Rounds, the Spreckels in Griffith Park.
Emily Huntington Miller first published her poem in 1865. This song version seems to have come out in 1881.
On August 8th last, when everything briefly re-opened (remember?) I got a yen to check online if they had re-opened the Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round, since it could be a good outdoor, nobody-around, wear a mask, Janet gets a scrollwork bench while we ride horses, all enjoy it outing. I’m glad I checked, and I’m grateful for LAist for covering the story, but I was really sad to see the guy who ran it and kept it running like a throroughbred for years, had tragically, suddenly gone to his reward. And as these things go, HE WAS THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD WHO KNEW HOW THE BLOODY THING WORKS.https://laist.com/2020/08/08/julio-gosdinski-dies-griffith-park-carousel-merry-go-round.php
Keep watching this space to see what happens, after the plague has passed, with this magnificent and historic old instrument. The Disney folks ought to get involved — for years Walt told the story that it was here, while watching his kiddies go round, that he dreamed up Disneyland. I regret that I found it so late, that my visit recorded above may have been my last.
The stately old trees waltz around in the breeze Near the small carousel in the park The children and nurses quite empty their purses To ride to the music, and shout all the verses It’s simply enchanting to see grandma panting Sedately atop a white horse But children and grandma go home when it’s dark And then every lover is free to discover The small carousel in the park!
— Dorothy Fields and Sigmund Romberg, from “Up In Central Park” 1945
This is one of the best local history articles I’ve read in a while; it filled in huge gaps in my knowledge of a place I thought I knew intimately. If there is any Patient Reader with a direct line to Santa Claus: please ask him to support local journalism in LA this year, with an LAist donation. It’s worth it just for this article alone.
I lived for a few fantastic years in my twenties on 4th Street just above Rose. Our apartment house was just over the border of Venice, so my daily life straddled this old Black neighborhood of Ocean Park and the old Black neighborhood of Venice, Oakwood. All of these were a few blocks from, indeed overlapped with, the old Gay neighborhoods around the music-dance-dine-and-drink nightlife of Ocean Park pier, and the poet-and-artist colonies along the Canals and the walk-streets. When I arrived in the late eighties, these cultures were dead but still warm — or rather, I showed up just as the awesome but fleeting ghost of this old beach culture was leaving the corpse. My God — why was this amazing place, with its funky/grand architecture, magnificent beaches, diverse attractions, and cheap rents lying empty, vacant, forlorn? It was part of the mystique of the place it took me years to really understand. And believe me, once gentrification sets in, YOU SUDDENLY UNDERSTAND. The old Belmar, Ocean Park, Oakwood, Canals didn’t die, they were killed so richer people could move in. Sic semper Californienorum.
THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./ JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.
This folk song from Northumbria was the theme to a wonderful British series on Masterpiece Theatre when I was a lad. “When The Boat Comes In” was about labor and class struggles in the 1920s, in the gritty Tyneside industrial fishing ports of Northeast England. Oddly enough we all got addicted to the series! Owen Brannigan serves the song up raw but with relish, and smeared with sour cream.
UPDATE 2 12/2220: https://news.yahoo.com/world-closes-borders-britain-coronavirus-122239526.htmlNot only are the fish ‘n’ chips in the fryer — the whole damn island is sizzling away as well, in a smoking-hot rosbif-fondue. This season’s chaos was ENTIRELY CONCOCTED by Her Majesty’s Government. None of this — e.g., total civilizational panic and collapse — ever had to happen. Amid all this, I read somewhere that Boris may have given in on the fish issue! More anon…
Eleven days until Brexit, but there’s no deal yet. With mutant Covid-19 panicking Britain, and Christmas Week already begun, and BoJo’s general fecklessness, Britannia is in choppy waters and it looks like she has neither a pirate nor a pilot at the helm — only a clown — and the ship of state is drifting awfully close to the breakers over fishing rights.
“Fishing rights!!? How long is this piddling to go on??”
— John Adams, exasperated by the feckless Continental Congress in the musical 1776
Oh, Mr. Adams, this piddling can go on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years! Update: I wrote this post this morning, and this afternoon the BBC turns up with the most fascinating article on a Channel fisheries dispute you’re ever likely to read: It seems Charles II gave away fishing rights to the town of Bruges, which were claimed by a Flemish fisherman in 1963! https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55190259
It’s not just Scotland and Ireland that are discomfited by the fishery fail of Brexit. The whole perimeter of the UK is a traditional fishery!
And hegemony of the seas — particularly control of her coastline — has been a core element of British identity for centuries. It will be hard for Bojo to back down on this now, since it stupidly wasn’t handled properly to begin with a year or two ago. [Salty digression: check out my Royal Navy bookshelf:]
Consider the Channel Islands, Guernsey, Jersey and Sark, halfway between France and Britain. Since the Norman Conquest, these islands have a long and fascinating history of being claimed by, and protected by, and disputed by, while not ever being really part of, either realm. This includes the Islands’ separation from the rest of mainland Britain during the English Civil War, when practically all of the mainland was in Parliamentary hands, while the Channel Islands, almost alone, held out for King Charles. (The colony of New Jersey was awarded by Charles II in recompense for that loyalty.) Contrariwise, in WWII, the the rest of Britain held out, while Channel Islands were taken and held by Nazi invaders. (Nazi-held British territory! Complete with a death-camp on Sark.)The article below details Guernsey’s hard place, and the Gordian Knot of contradictory interests that BoJo looks set to just chop in pieces rather than negotiate. The Guernsey fishery epitomizes the absurdity of the countries of the English Channel reverting, in the 21st Century, back to being a bunch of stubborn, warring little mercantilist territories, all at odds with and in competition with one another. That’ll kill any fishery fast.
My roommate in Edinburgh, Jeremy, invited me and Chaim to spend one of our holidays at his family’s house in St. Peterport, the capital of Guernsey. It is a delightful island, warmer than Britain, with its own distinctive Anglo-French maritime culture, and wealthy from an influx of English tax exiles. (Because it is part of the British Crown; but not part of Britain; so they don’t pay income tax; or something like that.) As an incentive to read the article, I take this excuse to post snapshots from Guernsey, 1985.
The eponymous beeves on their home turf
What a fantastic guy, Jeremy Mattinson…an artist and musician. Sensitive and funny and intelligent, he taught me much. We both drank and smoke, which in those days you had to tick off on your forms to be assigned a room. So I’m grateful I got to share that tiny freezing room over the Pend in Milne’s Court with him. Can you imagine they let students smoke in a 1690’s tenement?
Jeremy hard at studying art. Remember when that meant sitting at a desk, with a PEN (…and coffee and cigarettes…)
Anyway, he and his lovely parents took us to the village of St. Andrew, where in 1914 a spontaneous divine possessory passion called a monk to build The Little Chapel…it’s quite stunning, and quite a story:
The chapel was originally built by Brother Déodat in March 1914 (measuring 9 feet long by 4.5 feet wide). After taking criticism from other brothers, Déodat demolished the chapel. He finished a second chapel in July 1914 (measuring 9 feet by 6 feet). However, when the Bishop of Portsmouth visited in 1923, he could not fit through the door, so Déodat again demolished it. The third and current version of the chapel started soon after the last demolition, and measures 16 feet by 9 feet. Déodat went to France in 1939 and died there, never having seen his chapel finished. In 1977, a committee was established to restore the chapel, and today it falls under the care of Blanchelande College.
The Valley Village View 