sweetheart redux

(I found one of my mom's old notebooks from the eighties.  her handwriting is atrocious but I'm transcribing her poetry) ************ Pinched and twisted In the dead of L.A. – Lost and more lost, she wanders, Not one word exchanged or offered- Bury and buy Again + again He exits Dripping gold Silent and dripping indifference Peripheral vision Revealed him Not to her.   Sheer wonder in Compromise . He’s glowing rays Of hate, death. Could his meaning have been Tender curiousity? The air is cool The sky is late The sidewalks are covered in Pages from desk calendars You (we) tread over days and days Of last year In which something happened – something – Lived and died – Putting me in a bleak park – Another lost day and dead years And dear but dead l.a. December 28 1989

Sometimes my body feels like a rattrap.  I can feel some small animal, hardly a morsel, sickly and slowing down inside my skeleton.  Every day for a year and a half straight I pondered the meaning of every inconvenience. Was a flat tire a sign that I shouldn’t leave the house?  I walked everywhere.  I was always seeing something I thought I should write down – a violent protest to end the war, a cop throwing his cigarette butt on the lush green grass of a public park.  Eventually, I tried to help homeless men and women and even children decipher a meaning to life. I approached it like a math problem: this one person has to suffer enough to cover a sadness deficit so some other guy and his girl can live in a decent apartment and both own cars. You shouldn’t describe the meaning of life to a sick person unless you are also sick.  My body is a rattrap but I feel okay, all i...

Framed beneath the smoggy, pink sunset, the gray frankness of lonesome smoggy streets lets Angelenos know that the city is a heartbreaker. Good and bad and mean and nice and happy and sad. Why does there have to be so many people? How can there ever be enough attention for each of us? Dear Native Angelenos, I have no siblings. Can we be brothers and sisters? Do you like me? Am I pretty? I like dangerous streets  and safe ones, too.   I like attention but I also like being ignored.

The Circle of Life One day when I was driving on Los Angeles Avenue in Los Angeles the city, I saw 3 cop cars worth of cops tiredly swooping homeless peoples’ possessions into standard issue blue tarps they were trying to fold into portable bundles for the harassed indigents to take with them to some other street or park. One cop was shrugging off a homeless man like he wasn’t there, as he collapsed the man’s tent, and another cop ignored a woman repeating, “That’s my stuff.  That’s my stuff.”  There was a pick up truck full of grocery carts being reclaimed from the homeless camp, presumably to be taken back to the stores they came from.  One woman began to charge at a cop but once she got inches away, she realized there was nothing she could do, physically; she just hollered up close in the police man’s face.  She had the kind of Midland American accent that I usually hate to hear, but in this situation, the aggressively nasal vowels added to the sense of her b...

I’ve long had this wish that it’d be possible to live inside the ground zero of nostalgia.  This is more of a daydream, along the lines of sci-fi and the idea of teleportation.  My more realistic version of trying to embody the bittersweet peter pan root of nostalgia is to imagine training myself to adapt my thinking to nostalgia, the way Buddhists train themselves to be zen or recovering alcoholics train themselves to be sober.  That’s what December is like for me.  I know that Christmas Day is at its most basic a few hours of exchanging gifts, a few hours of cleaning up afterwards, a couple hours of appreciating the gifts and then a festive dish for dinner; that is at least the make-up of my Christmas days.  There is no getting around the fact that Christmas ends.  Nonetheless, every December I plan which Christmas light displays we’re going to drive to and marvel at and which Christmas movies feel the most special to me and will be watched a milli...

 "SHOWGIRL CONFIDENTIAL"  (Cover Photo by Dusti Cunningham) PLEASANT GEHMAN, AUTHOR OF “SHOWGIRL CONFIDENTIAL” BIOGRAPHY Pleasant Gehman is a true renaissance woman: writer, dancer, actor, musician and painter. A Hollywood icon, during the 1970’s, she was one of the first punks in Los Angeles, documenting the scene she helped create in her fanzine “Lobotomy”. During the 1980’s, she toured across North America fronting her three bands, all of whom released multiple recordings: The Screaming Sirens, The Ringling Sisters and Honk If Yer Horny. She was also the booker for the seminal Los Angeles clubs Cathay De Grande and Raji’s.  Since the early 1990’s, under the stage name Princess Farhana, she has appeared internationally as a professional belly dancer and burlesque performer and teacher. She has danced and acted in numerous motion pictures, in music videos and on television. She has appeared in many documentaries on belly dance and burlesque, performin...

I’m always mentioning on here how I try to make dead things from my past (dead people, friendships, places) come back to life by researching them online.  Well I spent hours trying to use Google maps to get an aerial view of a house of a friend of my mom’s that she doesn’t know anymore.  This man was a packrat, but if you have to be one, he was a pretty good one – his floors were littered with money and old paperback books of Peanuts cartoons, his favorite, and also weir things like that Snoopy Sno-Cone maker from the 1980’s that many of us my age may remember.  This packrat indoors was cool in its way but I’m way too used to packrat environs to be interested in all the half-buried treasure trash for long, but he lived in a pretty neighborhood, and his back yard was absolutely one of a kind.  Hidden in the overgrown grass was some of the most beautiful tilework I’ve ever seen.  I had a suspicion that some famous tile person must’ve made and laid these tiles him...

Tender Monster Destiny             Hope Street is a street just like any other in Los Angeles, except that its name makes it seem promising.  A useless person sitting in his or her car at a stop light and seeing that they are about to intersect Hope would probably think, Could this be a sign?             Are there plain white college boys hidden in apartments on this street, writing screenplays for a movie they’re going to make someday for Public Television about their L.A. experience?             The name makes this street sound full of action and import, a street with a secret, a street that lives out its charm with the clean bend of palm trees and Hopscotch formations drawn on its pavement.             It was on this street that Joe’s car pass...