The Tangible, Textural Past

In promotional news, if you're in New York City, come see me and Toby at Quimby's on June 24. We still don't know what we're going to say to each other, but we always have a good time talking. He's smart as a whip and a tremendously elegant critic. 

And listen to the most recent episode of the Take-Up, a podcast of which I can now officially announce I'm a cohost. Someday I'll get that Rotten Tomatoes critic approval, dammit. 

This week my husband and I celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary. Thirteen is a lucky number for me, not an unlucky one, so I felt good about it; but this week has been emotionally cruddy for me and work-intense for him, so our celebration amounted to a couple glasses of prosecco and a medium-good noir. 

I don't know how the years compound into decades. That's the element I can't countenance about time passing. I understand how months slide up into years, how weeks collect into months, but in terms of time passing unexpectedly, too quickly, it's all about the mysteriousness of decades for me. I sent someone my From Me to You posts today and had to acknowledge that the first one was written a decade ago. That was impossible to believe. It's been 18 years since Matt and I moved in together. Equally impossible. I don't know what happened to 2014-2019 in particular. 

Enough of that. 

I've mentioned here that I'm working on two projects simultaneously: essays about Tom Paris and a novel about Jean Harlow's second husband. "Working on" is disingenuous, because all week I've gotten nothing done except reading. I haven't felt well in either body or mind, but I'm also pretty unmotivated right now. Ironing out certain issues with Wire Mothers has been draining, and the Tom Paris project has stalled. I know it's because it's a book I know how to write and that's not as exciting as a book I don't know how to write, and also it's essays, which are kind of naturally less exciting for me than fiction, because I'm arranging (landscaping) rather than inventing (growing). I wanted to Produce, just so I didn't get in the habit of not producing. I haven't. Maybe next week I will. 

The thing I want to do more than any work is lie on my back and think about Jean Harlow's second husband, about just how cynically Norma Shearer married Irving Thalberg, about whether John Gilbert could have beaten the bottle and remained a star - about all those circumstances and the ways I want to sketch and narrate them, and specifically about the tangible, textural existence of those days. I ordered some samples of the perfumes Jean supposedly preferred (lots of fiction and legend, unclear what's true), and those smells have proved so evocative that the actual work of writing, outlining, characterization is all less appealing than the thinking. I tried to go to Grauman's to look at and touch Jean's handprints (again), but the courtyard was closed that day so I'll have to go back. I've looked at their house, which is still standing, on Zillow. I bought a poster of the Hollywood sign as it existed then, with the -land attached, and put it up in my office. 

I want to daydream about these lives, consider them while I listen to scratchy jazz, mourn for them while I breathe in Mitsouko. Don't worry, I'm not Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time, pining to death for an age I'll never live in. But in starting to take steps toward telling a famous yet unresolved story, I feel a strong desire to psychologically inhabit a vanished time and place as fully as possible before I get going (rather than flatly researching it, as I did for Europe in the 1930s). 

Speaking of compounded decades. 

Hollywood changes constantly, in a technological and architectural way, but some things about it (danger, allure, fortune, dishonesty) haven't changed in a hundred years. It's the details I seek, pinning down the scents and sounds and objects so I can tell the story as freely and as instinctually as possible. 

On a related note, I got some feedback on the Casablanca book that I'm pretty sure is right but I can't figure out how to fix without knocking big holes in the timeline. And I really need another paper copy  of the manuscript to work with in order to solve these problems, which is (take my word for it) deeply annoying. Whine, whine. 

The other project on my plate is an hour-long talk about...myself as a writer? I think? that I've been asked to give to a group of older folks in late June. I'm looking forward to the event, but my first draft of the talk was not suitable, and time is running out to write another one. Another thing I couldn't motivate myself to do this week. 

Next week, instead. Somewhere between the thinking and the daydreaming and the whining, there will be work. 

Hooray for Hollywood (Sign)

Today's my birthday and I've had a rip-roarin' time. I got some wonderful gifts - mostly book-based, which was excellent - and Matt and I hiked to the Hollywood sign down in...uh, Hollywood. Just like Stonehenge, you can't actually walk right up to the Hollywood sign or get close enough to touch it. In part I'm sure this is to keep vandals and souvenir-hunters out, but they say it's because the path there is too dangerous, with landslides and rattlesnakes and such.

Even getting to some cool views of the sign was (for my out-of-shape ass) quite a hike. It was a wide and well-kept trail most of the way, occasionally paved, but we were really crawling our way up and around the mountain that the sign sits on, Mount Lee, so we gained a lot of altitude in a relatively short distance. The views on the way up were goddamn incredible, though. All of central L.A. just spread out like a map.

Click to embiggen. This is the Hollywood Reservoir with the geographical district of Hollywood in the background.
Burbank is to the right and downtown to the left, neither visible. This was early on in the hike. 

I could see the smog like cotton wadding in between the buildings in downtown. If I'd known more about the area I likely would have been able to tell you the actual streets we could see down; as it was, Griffith Observatory was very easy to spot.

I want to go back again, because we went left instead of right and got this view of the sign:

No, that tower is not growing out of my head. 

Instead of this view (not my picture):

If you live in L.A. and want to do this hike, go here, where this picture came from.
We would never have found our way without that site.

I wanted to get that close, even if it was through the fence, to get an idea of how big the letters actually are. We were tired enough at elevation Tower-in-Head, though, and it was an even steeper climb around the back of the mountain. As it was, we could see that the H badly needed repainting. It was cool as hell to get even that close.

I don't know why all the other people we saw taking pictures were enthused about the sign. For me it's an emblem of an interest, a devotion, that's given me many hundreds (probably thousands) of hours of joy and intellectual stimulation. I can imagine living in sight of the sign and thinking of it at first as a symbol of what you want to achieve, what you're determined to achieve, and then, as the years wear on, seeing it bitterly or otherwise unhappily. It's sad for me to think about. At this time, I'd love to live in sight of the sign, but I can't imagine it ever being worth our while.

I scared the bejesus out of Matt when I spotted the sign through the windshield while we were on Beachwood Drive, on the way to the trailhead, exclaiming and squealing in joy. I was just about as geeky as I ever get. The geekitude of actually living in Los Angeles still hasn't faded, and it's been four months since I moved here. I still get a little thrill when I'm driving on a freeway and see a sign for, I don't know, Burbank or Santa Monica or the Hollywood Freeway. I'm actually here! goes my brain. I try to tell my brain not to be such a damn movie nerd, I live here now, just be cool. But it won't. Movies just matter too much to me.

There. Somewhat meaningless happy post = another piece of the Birthday Experience.