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.
The thrift stores re-opened; Huzzah! Ten bucks and a mask can once again buy what the late, lamented LAPL (still closed) once provided for free. But ten bucks buys a lot when it buys ten books. Here’s one: not a first edition but a very fine one from the 50’s (Book Club Edition), with floury paper and razor-sharp printing that sticks in the eye. It’s got a slick durable cover for carrying down to the garden. Plus, an excellent, 15-years-after-I-wrote-it introduction from the author. I recommend this book to any Patient Reader who hasn’t visited the BNW since high school.
Every page is coated with lead; every page frosts the fingers at the touch, until by constant turning, your wrist, your elbow, your arm is throbbing with the cold of dread. You grow numb even as your Iced-over eyes tear through Huxley’s kaleidoscopic prose — darting madly away from the page for relief, only to see your own brave world outside your own brave sunny green window.
Your whole soul is encased with ice. You are frozen, you can’t put it down, but to read on is a torment.
…in the July heat of the San Fernando Valley. Recently I hiked up the Old Stagecoach Road to see what July was doing to the hills out there in the chaparral.
It was all intensely colorful in the Julian sun; I didn’t stray too far from the oak shade.
I’m always amazed how green the California natives are in the high summer. It’s the invasive pasture grasses that turn to brown, making hay to fatten the longhorns of Rancho El Escorpion. But they’ve long-since vanished. So instead, every year, the oats and bromes become fodder for our wildfires. Somehow, these artemisa hang on, mugwort and sagebrush huddled together.
It’s growing with the buckwheat, orange above. The flashy coral-red shoots are the fall colors of dear deerweed.
A fire seems to have started here recently; it sliced through the meadow, then mysteriously died back. Could it have been a controlled burn? If natural, it was a miracle — maybe a ground-fire at a a slow creep? Maybe it was a beneficial clearing out of a too-crowded chaparral. The burn gave the hills an eerie sepia color, with dramatic shadows, wistfully beautiful — like projections on the present, from a forgotten old Western.
There were several healthy stands of Giant wild rye, and abundant laurel sumac.
There were only two milkweed plants, but extremely vigorous. They’re in a brilliant spot for seeds to tumble down and take over an uncrowded slope.
Asclepias fascicularis
narrow-leaved milkweed
Here, right at the end, in a tricky run of the road between the creek and a cliff, aptly at the end of the Devil’s Slide, was the most splendid Poison Oak I’ve ever seen. It cascaded, neon red, into the very shoulder of the road. Imagine if Miss Kitty had removed her kid gauntlets for the warmth, and let her fair forearm dangle in the shady oak air, just outside the jouncing coach…it would be a case. But if you respect it — gorgeous.
Pacific Poison Oak, a great lord of the woodlands. His banner bore the strange device: Noli me impune lacessit
“Up Your Assets With Sybill’s Stocks” is pre-empted to bring you the following Aug. 1, 2020 UPDATE: SHOCK! Sen. Biden announced he has put off announcing his choice for Veep, our future likely de facto unelected President, until later in the summer. Presumably he is reading the tea leaves of world events right up to the edge of the election, before casting “Biden’s Biden.” Probably he’s vetting her (oops!) their past utterances for any whiff of scandal. Or maybe somebody noticed August 1 was a Saturday and Joe was booked to go fishin’. Or — tee hee — he’s going to keep us waiting until the very last minute to spring his exciting surprise upon our distracted nation. Watch “Sybill the Soothsayer” in this space as she peers through the dark mirror into our immediate future!
Tomorrow is August 1, 2020 the date upon which, so we have been promised, Sen. Biden will reveal his hand-picked Vice-Presidential nominee. Since the person revealed tomorrow has a good chance of becoming an un-elected President of the United States, either de facto, or de jure, the View wanted to get this out before the inevitable excitement breaks over the running mate’s debut.
It is important to start seeing the Democratic Party as the responsible party, and demand governance of them, accordingly.
The vote in November for seats in Congress, is a perfectly good place to take citizen outrage. Please consider a vote, if possible in your district, for the outsider, the non-DNC rookie candidate. A Warren or Bernie supporter in Congress would be a great outcome! Vote for Biden we must, but we can also vote for Democrats prepared to hold government, police, public institutions, the Fed, to their proper spheres. Vote for non-traditional candidates, those committed to considering better human lives as the goal of all good government. Vote for candidates eager to secure the blessings of liberty — Net Neutrality; organic food; fully-funded parks; new good-faith models for public schools, plazas, cities, that keep us safe but don’t just stifle liberty and constrict individuals; clean air and water and recreation sites; affordable health care — all these, must not seem futile, anymore, ever, and change is long overdue.
Watch and ward: SOME Democrats will soberly intone, that it is a matter of national honor to continue Trump’s give-away to Wall Street. We will be offered sanctimonious slogans like “Wall Street Debt Is Public Debt, and We Must All Pay Our Debts.” Watch, it’ll be Democratic congresspeople voting for more crippling austerity for the states and cities, while giving the ghosts of the Fed free rein tinker with the money supply for their own purpose. (Hint: it’s not to get you more supply). Watch and ward!
Shun the candidates who spout the old Clinton-era lawyer-dictated double-speak about balanced budgets and limits on government but never on growth, and phony pandering to the imaginary bottom lines on Federal social spending. If in months to come, with undivided control of both houses and the Presidential veto pen, we see Democrats stand up to denounce Medicare for All; or stand up, again, for ever-more colossal Pentagon budgets, we will have to fight them. I don’t think there will be any Republicans anywhere left who dare show their face, so it’s just us, now folks. If we don’t make a better society with this one last tool we may ever have, this slender branch hanging halfway down the plunge of the cliff; this last gasp of un-elected quasi-illegitimate corporate binary two-party non-democracy, woe, woe, woe unto our cursed generation! We will deserve whatever ghastly vengeance the Millenials will brew up for us, during our old age.
It’s a controversial remedy for the depression caused by not seeing family and friends, but a Valley Village man promotes recharging one’s batteries by watching cats watching birds. ”Medicare For All, being presumably off the table forever, we know we’re all on our own, and while the Horsemen ride, mental health is more important than ever.” Our Local Health Freak reminded that “Classic birdwatching is a known nerve therapy; just add cats! Soothing effects can be trebled by adding Two Kitty Cats Cute to get hypnotized by the incessant twittering and flitting about in the fragrant eucalyptus branches. I make it a weekly regime.”
“In fact, “ this modern Bernarr Macfadden droned on while wagging his index finger in the air, “no better heart, lung, skin or nerve tonic can be found than watching cats watch birds.” When challenged on his outlandish theory, even by the exploited Kitty Cats, our local health nut waved his arm dismissively. “Boring? It’s supposed to be boring! And you two –! Get back to work. Daddy’s been reading about Congress.”
The Valley Village View 