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Nasa Discovery Of Planet Remarkably Like Our Own Gives Hope for ‘Second Earth’
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Peter Hay’s ‘Broadway Anecdotes’ — Ex Libris VVV
VIRAL LIBRARY DEPT.
“Nothing with Kings, nothing with crowns,
— Stephen Sondheim, ‘Comedy Tonight’
Bring on the lovers, liars, and clowns…”
Nothing with dust-jackets, nothing with linen-rag paper, nothing with hand-sewn leather bindings. Just a paperback re-print of a BRILLIANT, hilarious, indispensable book of unexpurgated Broadway lore. These anthologies are hit-and-miss when you find them; I am glad as hell that this one is the real deal. It was behind glass on our shelf, possibly a gift from a Patient Reader, possibly a Thrift Store or yard sale find from when THAT was a thing.
However it came here, the View twinkles with gratitude, kaleidoscopic with mirth.
Laugh a page, really. Also it is comprehensive, as note with its beguilingly plausible argument that George Washington, first in the hearts of his countrymen (roll sad snare drum), was also America’s first theatre “fan.” Well who else? How else did the General learn to stand so erect, and to trim his speeches and letters to the finest English meter? How did he learn to stand before freezing men, poor men, exhausted, hopping in the snow on bloody feet, and lead them through bitter struggle? The man went to the theatre as often as he could. Of course he did. He was among the first to buy a ticket for The Merchant of Venice at Yorktown. The Father of Our Country knew theatre, therefore he knew life.
Lowering The Boom
DISASTER CAPITALISM DEPT.
It’s harder than ever for the View, these days, to tune into the wavelengths of the 10%.
Patient Reader, if you’re in the 10%, forgive me. Or better, reach out, write in and tell me how you feel about things these days. Because all I hear is that it’s Christmas and things are booming and the market is up up up, still way over 23,000, “liquidity” (free cash for banks) is flowing like Niagara, and more goods are racing through Amazon than ever before. All the construction crews are out a-building the new condos and malls in North Hollywood. There are more Amazon trucks in the streets, packages piled before doors, than before Christmas! AND, Tomorrow must look brighter still, like a Christmas with snow crystals and potpourri in every room! — for tomorrow, next week, next month, the Washington bailout moohlah REALLY starts pouring into your accounts, silently, like a rising batholith, floating underneath your securities position, uplifting inexorably, as fast as the Fed can pump magma. May will be even more merry, tra la, for JUST as your purse is fattening, “The Economy” is going to be “opened” and you’ll be able to order even MORE boxes from Amazon. What does it feel like, working in your slippers, ordering up fancy goods like Marie Antoinette applying for a job as personal shopper to William Randolph Hearst — but, whether you do or you don’t work or spend, STILL knowing you’re just getting richer and richer and richer by the day, pretty much guaranteed, forever, as long as money can flow through a wire, and that Amazon service will just get faster and free-er and faster and free-er…
Isolated and circumscribed, frequently masked, uninsured, under-employed, unprotected in any way by any social program or medical facility except a two hour gasping Metro ride to the Dump Room at County should the Cough come, awaiting no check from any government, I can’t feel it. Is this the famous “Meritocracy” of America, which I’ve heard of so often, at last playing out and paying off big? Are you at all concerned about the unemployment and Main Street economic collapse? I know in your wide-open private jet Economy, money no longer has anything to do with people or things or Main Street or hospitals or travel strandings or life or death or food or toilet paper– but how does it feel? Just help me understand. Then I can try to process it and write about it and maybe take a few pictures for the blog. Maybe you could recommend a book or two to help me understand. We can trade! I’ve got lots of books to give you.
Shaggy Old Dodder, The Tramp of Coastal Sage Scrub
For a year I thought they were litter — kids with silly string destroying a nice plant. Then I thought they were discarded strands of nylon netting from construction projects. Then I noticed them everywhere in the pretty green scrub, lurid and louche. Yucch. I shuddered when I finally realized they were alive.
They must have come from someplace awful, thinks the View, like Australia, or Planet Xenon. They must be invasive here, because they’re so ugly and out-of-place.
They were the nuisance that spoiled great shots. I have hidden them from your View for two years, cropping them out of every shot where they appeared. But yesterday the Muse, Miss Corona Virus, a dame with more curves than a scenic railway, came into the View and demanded I research this Dodder, as he’s called, aka Chaparral Dodder.. The silly string fell from my sore eyes. This stuff ain’t child’s play. It’s evolution.
Invasive? Can be. But note this hillside is next to the fire-lane-trail. Plus, the whole of this ridge, both slopes, for about a quarter of a mile, was nothing but buckwheat; and this was the only dodder. In proportion, the dodder occupied only a small patch of the unnaturally mono-cropped buckwheat.
Meet Cuscuta californica, proud and noble member of the CFP. A relative of morning glory (hence datura?) and also of bindweed. So think clinging vine; but dodder is the only vine in the family that is parasitic.
Dodder hangs like a hammock in the sun all day, claiming, along with the birds and the bees, the upper berths of scrub, the buckwheat canopy, up off the nasty hot ground. Like the pollinators with which it competes (or rather, crowds out) dodder harvests buckwheat’s good things for its own purposes — only it sucks them very, very slowly. All season long, in fact. We know it doesn’t kill the host, it just stomps on its face for a season and really wrecks its sex appeal for said birds and bees. Then, like any annual, dusty old Dodder puts out flowers, sets teeny tiny seeds, and dies back. The host gasps and recovers, while the dodder seeds hop to the ground to sprout on the soil. Once sprouted, they have only days to fish around for another buckwheat, or deerweed, a process the shoots apparently accomplish by following scents and aromas of host plants. Then it grabs hold, and hoists its whole self up like a hobo grabbing hold of a freight car, slowly losing all contact with the ground as it clambers to the top. Amazing.
It seems a golden land always attracts its share of schnorrers. But isn’t old Dodder, itself, a bit golden? Hmmm? [twists pinky in dimple]
The Valley Village View 