Revision City

Saint Junipero Serra

Outside my office at the Catholic college where I work, there was a statue of Saint Junipero Serra, the 18^th century founder of the California missions.  Considering the Age of Enlightenment was raging in Europe, Serra was a man a little behind the times.  His desire was to convert all of the indigenous people to Christ.  No science or philosophy needed, just intense prayer and a lot of discipline.  So much so, in fact, that many scholars now claim the missions were little more than west coast plantations using the Native Americans as an enslaved work force.

This casts a decided pall on my elementary education at the local Catholic school where in fifth grade, we were tasked with making a scale model of our favorite mission.  (Does an eleven year old have a favorite mission?)  I cannot think of a more onerous task for me, the kid with no artistic ability.  My colleagues in the class seemed to excel at this:  one created an architect’s model of his mission; another ingenuously created his mission out of a mixture of box mashed potatoes and oatmeal to create the most realistic stucco and adobe I had ever seen.  A third, a girl, created a passable mission structure, but included a parking lot.  There were miniature inch-high, colored plastic Indians in a variety of war-like poses taking on cowboys on one side of her mission gardens, and on the other were her brother’s Matchbox cars glued to the parking lot.  This temporal confusion did not seem to affect her score, however, as she won the contest for Best Mission.  I had the temerity to protest her win to the nun who was our teacher.  She put me in my place, saying my mission did not even look like a mission—it looked like a chocolate cake someone dropped from a four-story building—and my young female competitor deserved to win not only because her mission spanned all dimensions of time and space, but she, herself, had a vocation to join the sisterhood once she graduated high school in just seven or so years.  The girl did not join the convent; she did, however, invite me to her wedding.  I didn’t go.

Coming back to the life-like Junipero Serra outside my office, one day, he disappeared.  No one seemed concerned, nor did anyone have answers.  I got a lot of, “Wait, there was a statue there?”  Yes, yes there was a statue there of a recently canonized saint and now he is gone.  “Oh well,” was the common response.  Could his disappearance be linked to recent revisionist history that Serra was no different from a southern plantation owner during the Civil War?  The statue was very common across Los Angeles at a number of Catholic institutions.  Did they all disappear?  Were there not posters up asking, “Have you seen this man?”  Right in front of our noses we have a plethora of missing person cases; granted, they are all the same person, but someone should be looking into this.  We should be putting up phone numbers for anonymous tipsters.  How about an Amber Alert?

 

This got me thinking about all of the places in this city that have played a huge role in my life that are not there anymore.  I can hear a certain voice in my head narrating this fantasy documentary.  Ralph Story, veteran journalist, used to have a multi-part series on PBS where he traveled around town to tell us about interesting and eclectic places that have since disappeared.  I used to love his show.  Los Angeles is a town that is continuously revising itself.  In a city known for the film industry, everything from major landmarks to mom and pop stores often get torn down and turned into something else like sets on a sound stage.  Actually, it is worse.  An acquaintance of mine who worked for Warner Brothers said if a particular movie or TV show  was successful, the studio would tack a plaque to the sound stage wall marking the historical place where the show was filmed.  Somewhere on the lot was a plaque stating that The West Wing was filmed there, or in another part of the landscape, ER was filmed here.  Real landmarks are not so lucky.  They don’t get any plaques or special notice.

Years ago, a band featuring me on keyboards played a Sunday afternoon set at the Fashion Square Mall, an open-air, upscale shopping place in Sherman Oaks.  In more recent history, the mall was remodeled with a roof and a variety of new stores.  Over the years, stores have come and gone.  I walk there occasionally for exercise, and I also shop, but when I go to the north corner outside Macy’s next to the shoe repair where we once played, guess what?  No plaque.  There is no evidence we ever played there; in fact, there is no longer any room for a band there.  Did I expect some marking of the historical occasion?  No, because we were pretty bad, but the point is, the space is gone and the mall no longer has music on Sunday afternoons.  (Okay, maybe we were so bad they cancelled future performances.  I accept full responsibility.)

On Ventura Boulevard where my wife and I used to go for frozen yogurt when all we had was a few dollars, that’s gone.  It is a porn shop.  Hamburger Hamlet, a place I’ve written about on this blog, and which played a major role in our dating and married life, sits vacant, dusty tables and decrepit plants still in place, the bar empty of alcohol.  Another place important to us was Café Cordiale.  Peter May, the owner, became a friend and we relished the food and live music there, so it was a shock when Peter announced he was closing up shop to go work at Lawry’s Prime Rib.  The new restaurant that took over the Café Cordiale space was so chic and so overpriced that they felt they did not have to put out the name over the front door.  It was just “that place with the lattice work all over the front.”  The place went under and now there is another restaurant there.

Bob’s Big Boy used to have a restaurant on Van Nuys Boulevard where acres of car lots now sit.  They were known for carhop dining.  My parents used to go there when they were dating.  My wife’s family would go there after church on Sunday.  And all of us used to go after high school football games on Friday nights.  There was the Jolly Roger hamburger joint on the outside of the Fashion Square Mall.  Gone, replaced by the mall trash dumpsters.  The Sherman Oaks Galleria is nothing like the one made famous by Moon Unit Zappa, the original Valley Girl.  It used to have department stores and a multi-level group of smaller establishments.  Does anyone remember when a plane from Van Nuys Airport crashed on the mall roof?  No, and the mall is gone and in its place is an imposter:  Sherman Oaks Galleria has an Arclight Theater complex, a number of restaurants, and business offices, and the same parking garage, the most confusing in the city.  All you can do is lumber from the movie theater to the Cheesecake Factory and then hopefully find your car when you’re done.

When I drive up the canyon through the claustrophobic streets of Brentwood to work every day, I must navigate a virtual obstacle course of flatbed trucks, cement mixers, contractors, workmen, electricians, gardeners, landscape artists, glass installers, architects, and the domestic help all employed remaking and keeping up every house on every street.  For sale signs go up, the house is purchased, and immediately a bee hive of activity swirls around the stucco and brick transforming the beautiful home into a post-modern box structure with all the curb appeal of beige that looks like a science fiction nightmare.  No sooner do the trucks and workers finish up when a new for sale sign goes up and the process begins all over again.  Does anyone actually live in those houses?  Does anyone belong to the neighborhood?  My university wants to remodel its fitness center and swimming pool, but the process has been mired for several years in hearing after hearing.  The school has had to pay for environmental reports and traffic studies.  Will it ever get built?  We can only hope, but why don’t those in the houses below us have to have hearings and meet city requirements to plant more trees?  Some of the houses have been made over three and four times in the last nine years.  A neighborhood of houses with character has been transformed into a post-apocalyptic nightmare.  Some of them have fake lawns, like an NFL stadium.

Driving around the city, places disappear, are obliterated, literally wiped off the map.  What comes after is not necessarily better.  It is often much, much, much worse.  Bleak.  Ugly.  Unlike writing, revision of the city does not make the city better.  At best it is different.  Often, it is blighted and void of character.

The other day, my wife and I were sitting at a stoplight when we both happened to glance over to a corner lot that had been recently plowed under.  Now it was just a big field of dry tumbleweeds and dirt.  “What was there before?” she asked.

I stared at the vacant space.  “I really can’t remember,” I replied.

The light turned green and the guy behind us was already honking for us to go.  Los Angeles:  always moving forward.

Saint Junipero Serra:  still missing.

Ralph Story, Host of Things That Aren't Here Anymore (PBS)

Stillness

Deer photographed from my car (August, 2019)

Often in these last days of summer, the mist makes its way up the canyon from Santa Monica Bay and swirls around the Spanish Colonial architecture of the college where I work.  On these days of meetings, working with students, organizing lists and course syllabi, I try to get in at least two or three walks around campus to keep the blood flowing.

The thing about Los Angeles is that you are never more than an hour from every kind of geographic environment:  oceans, lakes, a river, flood plains; mountains, deserts, and several valleys.  On the steps of the chapel on campus, I can see mountains, the flats of Santa Monica, and the bay itself stretching out to Catalina Island on a clear morning.

Quite often, especially in the monastic summers when the campus is mostly in repose while summer session is being held downtown at our other campus, the lawns and walkways become the province of nature:  deer, coyotes, squirrels, sparrows, red-tailed hawks, owls and butterflies.  Occasionally, during the fall and spring semesters, we see wildlife in the quieter corners of the campus.  I have felt a particular kinship with the deer.  It is ironic that I used to accompany my father on his quest to shoot one every fall Saturday morning of my childhood.

A typical encounter goes like this:  I feel the fatigue of looking at paper after paper from my writing students.  Or, I have a challenging problem in research or writing that I must work out in my head.  I excuse myself from the office and go out and begin a trek around one of the walking paths that crisscross the campus.  A spot I like overlooks a deep canyon that flows south passed the Getty Center.  Red-tailed hawks ride thermals all the way up the canyon, searching for field mice and other small prey.  It is necessary to stand for a moment, close my eyes, and breathe deeply.  When I open them, I allow my vision and awareness to lock in on the canyon choked with eucalyptus, sage, yucca, and scrub oak.  Only then do I become aware of an otherness, a presence, and inevitably, the deer will materialize out of nowhere, grazing lightly while watching me.  I do not move, and they relax and go about their business.  I watch them, their movements, their patterns.  Usually, I see females and young ones; rarely do I catch a glimpse of the more cautious males, or bucks.  Sometimes, their antlers are in velvet, meaning they have not hardened yet and can be tender if the deer bumps into something or tries to fight another animal.

These deer seem to exist in a parallel universe to ours.  I have seen them gently grazing while students or cars pass within feet of them.  Only occasionally do they spook and lope away with a speed that is breath-taking.  Once I saw one sprint back and forth repeatedly across a rectangular patch of grass, relishing freedom like a condemned man.  I’ve seen them bedded down in the dense brush.  They do their thing and the human beings inhabiting their space do theirs.

I drink in the calm, measured life of grazing the hillside.  I feel the tension slip away as it does in deep meditation.  Feet away from each other, we human beings, facing tests and course work and rushing to class, exist parallel to the deer who take their time meandering across the canyon.  Two universes, two speeds, both unique.

So daily, I seek out this parallel dimension alongside the academic human reality.  I connect with nature—the deer—and allow my human cares to dissipate.  When I am driving onto or off of campus and I see a deer or two or three, I’ll stop and watch them.  Often, they have come right up to the car and walked so close I could have touched them.  I don’t.  I think that would disrupt the transparent membrane between our reality and theirs.  I just watch, and they watch me.

Once, while driving onto campus one early morning, I saw two coyotes in an open meadow, circling around, warily staring at me, baring teeth even though I did not even get out of my car.  This is strange behavior for coyotes except when they are cornered.  Normally, they run for cover and do not like to be out in the open.  If they are stalking something, they attack and carry the unfortunate prey away to the underbrush to strip flesh and gnaw on the bones.  But these two stared at me defiantly, and kept circling around.  I waited, holding my breath, and watched them from the safety of my car.  One, feeling I was not a threat, went down into the tall grass to pull and rip at something while the other kept watch.  The other came up out of the grass with a deer leg in his mouth and blood covering his snout.  This was desecration, a bloody testament to the horrors inherent in nature.  It is never all peace and tranquility.  This is life—predators and prey.  Even in the realm of the deer, every day is a struggle.  The rules of their universe parallel the rules of our own.

Not too long ago, our campus security saw a mountain lion crossing near the guard shack at the entrance to campus.  This hunter, the most fearsome predator in this area of the Santa Monica Mountains, was out and about.  A week ago, a mountain lion managed to cross from our western side of Interstate 405 in Brentwood to the eastern side where Bel-Air and Beverly Hills are located.  This is an amazing feat that a human being probably could not duplicate as the 405 is one of the busiest freeways in California.

We exist side-by-side with nature.  In Los Angeles, this means dealing with an alternative universe of great beauty, tranquility, violence and danger.  In short, one not unlike our own.  It is what makes Los Angeles unique as a large metropolis with a population equal to some countries.  It is the intersection of several strands of existence, and if we live here long enough, it becomes part of who we are.  Humanity and nature, us and our animal counterparts, side by side, the twin souls of the city.