LA en vie

New Orleans

Two years ago today, New Orleans drowned. My favorite city in the world.

Its eccentric, poetic people were scattered all over the country. They are still there. No one has helped them.

I can't help thinking that in Europe, in Japan, in Canada, in Australia, a major city could not be devastated and then left to die like this.

If you want to understand what has happened there, read this blog from the beginning. It will take you twenty minutes, and you will know more about it than our President does.

The Gulf Coast, where millions of our people are still suffering.

I see President Bush is in New Orleans today. No doubt his PR people had him go, after the fiasco of his not even bothering to mention the devastated region in his State of the Union address this year-- which shows what a priority it is to the White House. Oh, those people are probably all Democrats, anyway.

At least, they are now.

Reverend Carson

 

Father and child evacuated to Dallas

 

Rock and Sheila

 

William

T-shirt says "White Trash Refugee"

  Ricki

Rodney McGoey, Jr.

Blood Moon

If I were a superstitious person-- hey, who am I kidding, I am a superstitious person (it's my Irish side)-- anyway, the lunar eclipse last night surprised me by turning the moon blood red. This effect is called a blood moon and was expected by the astronomers, but to me, unprepared, it looked like a huge Omen hanging in the sky.

I stayed up till after three to watch for it, with one of my family members. We sat outside wrapped up on the steps, watching the moon through binoculars as it moved through the palm trees. The stars emerged brightly as the earth's shadow lengthened over the moon. The night looked lit up by an unearthly light--which of course it was. There was a blue glow on the lawn, and the bushes looked so alive that I half expected a large animal to appear through them.

It was very different from the last lunar eclipse I saw, which was in the summer of 1989. I was driving down a remote eastern New Mexico road in the high desert. By chance, it led straight as an arrow to the moon, straight for many miles, so as the eclipse proceeded, I just had to look up through my windshield. When the eclipse became total, I got out of the car on the side of the road and listened to the deep silence. The moon became a black disk surrounded by a white halo, and the stars were as brilliant as I've ever seen them.

So, last night I went to bed around 3:30, and at a little after five, another family member came and woke me up. "My taxi didn't come! Can you drive me to the airport? Like, right now?"

Los mexicanos

In the daytime, when you drive through Beverly Hills or Brentwood, you could think that you were in another country. Everyone you actually see on the street is Mexican. An army of Mexicans keeps Los Angeles running. It's the quiet reason people here don't really want to deport illegal immigrants (a popular issue back in West Virginia, where there are no immigrants to speak of).

This book tells you how to talk to your housekeeper, gardener or pool boy in Spanish.

Often when I'm switching stations on the radio, I hear an eerily perfect English phrase in the midst of a long roll of Spanish, and realize I am hearing a second-generation speaker. Or sometimes third-, or fourth-, or fifth- -- for I've met older people here who were born and raised in Los Angeles and don't speak English. They were here first, like Zorro.

They don't need English to live here, and that's what scares people.

Fair-weather friends

N's friend Paul has gone back to Paris and written me a letter saying he's disgusted to be back there. There have been only ten fair-weather days all summer in Paris-- the worst summer in thirty years-- so Paris-Plage was a bit of a bust.

"Isn't it wonderful?" said L, flipping through the fat September issues of fashion magazines. "All these winter clothes, and we don't need them!"

Too many catalogs

Catalogs. More of them arrive each day, like the multiplying brooms of the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Why?

Listen to the ra-a-di-o

It was a bit hard hearing the latest Country & Western songs in France-- a taste I acquired over many years of cross-country trips. If you've ever driven across the U.S., you know that there are long, long stretches of highway where if you don't have your own CDs, you are listening to Country and Western. My favorite song is "You're the reason God made Oklahoma."

It's fun to listen to the radio in Los Angeles, and most of the stations are in English. I enjoy scanning through them sometimes and listening to the brief snippets of Bible-thumping (how it reminds me of West Virginia!); rap; Spanish-language ballads sung with a choke in the voice; the news on NPR (pretty much only Iraq, Israel/Palestine and the United States), finishing with the unmistakable nasal whine of Jim Svejda on KUSC, an excellent classical station. Every morning, filmmaker David Lynch gives a weather report on indie station 103.1 from his balcony. But when I need to just get through a traffic jam, there's nothing like Go Country 105, the Country & Western station that in Darwinian fashion bumped a classical station off to AM radio shortly after I moved here. Right now there's a catchy  song by Carrie Underwood that must make a lot of men nervous:

I   dug my keys into the side of his pretty little souped-up four wheel drive--
carved my name into his leather seeeeeats--
I took a Louisville slugger* to both headlights--   
slashed a hole in all four tires--
maybe next time he’ll think before he cheats!

It's no doubt my gloomy outlook on life (which few people outside my family realize, I am relieved to say) but the fact that you can listen to the radio in the car all day, every day, and not learn anything about the rest of the world alarms me. This is an epoch in which Al Qaeda is striving to find a way to attack Los Angeles and Melbourne (why Melbourne?) with a nuclear bomb, and Lindsay Lohan is in the headlines again.

*Note to non-Americans: A Louisville slugger is a baseball bat.

Course-poursuite

A couple of nights ago I heard a few helicopters around 11 p.m.. I didn't pay much attention-- we live near the coast, and the helicopters are always flying nearby, surveying the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach. On the weekends, there are lots of small planes too, trailing advertising banners for beer.

N's friend Paul is visiting from Paris. He came into my study and said, "Viens voir, c'est une course-poursuite!" [Come see, it's a police chase!]

We went out on the balcony and saw three police helicopters with searchlights. They were almost overhead, and their searchlights seemed to be trained on the large vacant lot a few houses away from us. Homeless guys camp out there at night. C went exploring there one day and found lots of tents out of sight in the grass.

"There are a lot of police cars out front, too," said Paul. "Four or five!"

The searchlights were moving steadily and had converged, and the helicopters were  thundering in our ears. It occurred to me that the person they were looking for might be armed and dangerous, and very nearby.

There didn't seem to be much we could do, so after a few minutes, we went back inside. The helicopters and police cars fell silent a little while later, and peace returned to the neighborhood.

The rude children

Here's a subject I've been trying to avoid, but which keeps forcing itself on my attention.

Why are the children here so rude?

Yesterday I was walking out of a big drugstore and turned to smile at an adorable-looking boy of about seven, who was pulling at his father's hand. That's before I heard what he was saying.

"Get me that car, Daddy! I want that car!"

I waited for "Say please," but I already knew I was not going to hear it.

"Je veux" n'aura pas, a French child is told. ["I want" will not get.] I think American and specifically Californian parents (because I don't notice this rudeness so much in the east, and certainly not in the South) think their children can leave learning manners till they're older. Wrong, wrong, so wrong!

I'm from Los Angeles

One thing that has gotten easier since I moved away from Paris is the answer to the universal American question "Where are you from?" Instead of having to explain my whole life story, or tell a fib, as I did for so many years, now I can just say, "Los Angeles." And no more questions! People think they know it all.

The last bastion of English America

I am still in West Virginia, the alternate America. Almost everyone over 21 is obese, except the cigarette smokers and a few wiry workmen in blue jeans.

The other day I went to the county courthouse with my mother, and  while I was waiting for her, nosed around the building. There was a distinct air of the South in that courthouse, with its turning fans, opaque-glass-fronted office doors, and dark wood staircases-- it reminded me of my childhood in Jim Crow Louisiana, when the water fountains were still marked "White" and "Colored"; but although it is Southern, West Virginia has very few African-Americans (or any other minorities): 3.2 %, almost all in the few large towns. Few recent immigrants have made it over the mountains to West Virginia, either. Most of the natives are descended from Scotch-Irish settlers of the late 18th century. They still use quaint expressions that died out in British English hundreds of years ago and are marked "obsolete" in the dictionary. They tend to be truculent, blond and loyal.

On the wall above my bench was a large framed poster with photos of the two dozen or so sheriff's deputies. Every single one was a white man with an English or Scottish name.