Los Angeles whimsy v

Walking up through Koreatown the other day, I came across this on the corner of Beverly and Vermont -

Looking east back toward Downtown along Beverly Blvd

a replica of George Washington's Virginia home, Mt Vernon.

No views of the Potomac River from Beverly and Vermont, though.

You could call this whimsy (I've made it part of my series), but perhaps it's serious. It is remarkable how much extolling of Washington goes on here in the US - streets, cities, mountains, states named after him. A kneejerk quip might be "Thank God he won!" Because he lost just about every battle he commanded. And military buffs will tell you that he wasn't such a great general; he just waited till the British made a mistake - the fatal one - when they got their backs to the sea at Jamestown.

Which, of course, is his greatness - the ability to wait, to stand firm, the extraordinary, almost superhuman endurance. Bruce Wolpe, in the Sydney Morning Herald, once said that in this day and age, when we are cynical about political leaders, George Washington truly was extraordinary. And I'd agree. He was a monument before he was ever marmorealized. And it's not just to do with military leadership. It's also to do with the sober presiding over the creation of a new republic. I sometimes wonder what Washington would make of present-day American attitudes to taxation. In his 1787 Circular to the States, he asked for the 'mutual concessions which are requisite to the general prosperity'...

At any rate, I wonder if my latest example of Los Angeles whimsy is actually kitsch. Or is it genuine hommage?

If you'd like to read my thoughts on Mt Vernon itself, please see Let's Not Forget They Were Farmers at:

http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2011/10/lets-not-forget-they-were-farmers.html

And if you like my blogs, please vote for Loving Oz and the US in the Australian Writers' Guild's Best Australian Blog competition at:

 http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BAB2013

Vote for Loving Oz and the US

If you happen to like my blog Loving Oz and the US, you may like to vote for it in the Australian Writers' Guild's Best Australian blogs competition.

Here's a link to the voting form:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BAB2013

You might have to cut and paste it into your search bar.

That great Australia on the other side of the sphere

"That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia..." 

- Herman Melville, Moby Dick chap.24

I have been assured that this a southeast Queensland Bunya Pine (Araucaria bidwillii)  - growing just under the Hollywood Hills on the way up to the Hollywood Bowl.

So, not just eucalypts here. And the air is full at the moment of Australian fragrances - wattle and sweet pittosporum. Boy, you mightn't know it was America - except they drive on the other side of the road, signs are bilingual in English and Spanish, and, er, well...there's a sense of the unlimitedness of possibilities...

Los Feliz

As an Australian in Los Angeles, I actually feel as if I'm only over the other side of the drink. Admittedly that's got a lot to do with the gum trees everywhere. But I also love the fact that Los Angeles is a similar age to Sydney. The Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles was founded in 1781, in the decade which saw the First Fleet sail into Sydney Harbour.

And a lot of the Spanish land grants date around the same time as land was being granted to soldiers of the Crown in New South Wales. Part of Newtown in Sydney's inner west, the area lying south of King Street, was granted to the Superintendent of Convicts, Nicholas Devine, by Governor Phillip in 1794 and 1799. Part of the area lying to the north of King Street, was granted in 1806 to Governor William Bligh (yes, the Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame), who named it Camperdown and passed it to his daughter and son-in-law on his return to England in 1810. This marker at Montrose commemorates the Rancho San Rafael, the first of California's Spanish land grants made to Don Jose Maria Verdugo in 1784.

The rancho covered what is, these days, Glendale, Eagle Rock,La Cañada, Montrose and Verdugo City. From the south one of its boundaries went north along the east bank of the Los Angeles River and wrapped around the western side of Griffith Park. On the southern side of Griffith Park is Los Feliz, which was once a Spanish land concession made out to Cpl Jose Vicente Feliz in 1795 (See? Similar period). I've even seen a street directory which showed the borders of these old ranches.

I enjoy Los Feliz. It's one of those areas in Los Angeles that is described as 'walkable'.

You come out of the Metro Underground at Vermont and Sunset and, looking up Vermont, get a good sense of where you are in relation to the rest of the city.

Looking up Vermont Ave, the Hollywood sign in the west and Griffith Park with its observatory to the right

Los Feliz has bookshops, restaurants, street life...

and in the distance, glimpses of Frank Lloyd Wright houses

Or at least buildings in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, because the museum up here, in Barnsdall Park, is in keeping with the actual house, Hollyhock, further back on the hill

But this house, up in the hills, is the actual Wright, Ennis House, known by some as 'the Bladerunner house'

Welcome and unwelcome things at once

Such welcome and unwelcome things at once

'Tis hard to reconcile.

Shakespeare, Macbeth: Act IV sc.iii

Some Americans I've spoken to have expressed amazement when I've told them how safe I feel wandering Australian city streets at night; when I say that I can walk just about anywhere in downtown Sydney 99% sure that no-one else in the street is armed with a gun.

A police officer I met at a party here in the Valley told me that he is always armed - "I'm carrying now". I told him Australia has quite a different gun culture. He knew that, he said, almost wistfully, but he's seen too much. I know Australia has bikie shootouts and there's been an increase in violence with the growing amphetamine trade. But I get a sense here, in the US, that even the small-time criminals might be armed and I have a theory that Australian petty crims tend not to be, because even they don't want to raise the stakes.

On the other hand, you see some paradoxes here. The coppers standing by the roadblock at the end of a suburban street in Reseda were quite happy to casually tell me what they were doing as the chopper choppered overhead; a security guard in a baking carpark laughed and patted me on the shoulder when I told him he had the right idea, carrying an umbrella to guard against the sun (a gunman with a parasol). I saw a very grumpy woman at the end of her tether in a laundromat not only laugh when the owner came over and helped her, but rub him on the back!
  
This is a country where one state has recently backed the idea of teachers bringing guns into class:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/us/south-dakota-gun-law-classrooms.html?_r=0

But there's incredible courtesy and even affection between strangers here, of a sweetness and poignancy you don't get in Oz, and I wonder if that's the compensating factor.

Stumbling across history

We had lunch at Olamendi's down at Dana Point on the coast the other day.

We were only after some Mexican food for lunch, but found ourselves sitting at this table.

We asked the story. This was Richard and Pat Nixon's favourite Mexican restaurant - the Nixons had retired to San Clemente, five miles to the south - and we were sitting at their table.

It's nice to have little brushes with history you didn't expect.

Los Angeles whimsy iv

Babylon or Los Angeles?

This building, once the Samson Tire and Rubber Company, was designed in 1929 by the architects Morgan, Walls and Clements after the palace of Sargon II, an Assyrian king. It once served as a backdrop to the film, Ben Hur. Movies creep in everywhere here.

Answer

Answer to last week's quiz question:
The composer who was asked [by Alfred Newman] to present the 1938 Oscar for Best Score was Arnold Schoenberg, who did not attend the ceremony but sent a message in which he hoped that 'there will soon come a time, when the severe conditions and laws of modernistic music will be no hindrance any more toward a reconciliation with the necessities of the moving picture industry'.

Los Angeles whimsy iii

Why the North Hollywood Post Office is built in the style of a fairytale castle I don't know.

But it sure is another example of Los Angeles whimsy!

Quiz question

Which of the following composers was invited to present the 1938 Oscar for Best Film Score:

- Wolfgang Korngold
- Arnold Schoenberg
- Ernst Toch
- Hanns Eisler, or
- Alfred Newman?

Searching for Schoenberg

Located it! Brentwood Country Mart on 26th Street, established 1948, where, apparently (according Dorothy Lamb Crawford's book A Windfall of Composers), composer Arnold Schoenberg called out to Marta Feuchtwanger that he did not have syphilis.

Schoenberg was angry that in his recent novel, Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann had ascribed the invention of 12-tone technique to Mann's hero, Adrian Leverkühn, and that Mann had made Leverkühn syphilitic. Feuchtwanger was grateful Schoenberg had called out in German.

Bertolt Brecht's house is a mile down the street. Brecht was no longer in the United States in 1948 (he'd left in 1947) but the fact does illustrate how all these artists lived within coo-ee of each other in Los Angeles.

For my article on the emigre composers in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s, please go to my blog post, A Culture in Exile, April 25 2013.