Marie Javins's Blog, page 76

A Bit Warm Here

I drove up over the hill from the coast, winding down the mountain roads to Anzo-Borrego State Park.

No wonder all the campgrounds shut at the end of May.

En Route to the Desert

I read about seeing the Milky Way out in the desert, and the best place for it in this part of the country turns out to be the same place as some tremendous iron sculptures. I booked a rental car and a hotel room.

After driving my rental car an hour and a half into the desert, I pulled over at an outlet mall I'd never heard of.

At least half the storefronts were empty and shuttered. I went into a few shoe stores. The only customers in the whole mall were in the brew pub, the plus size shop, or in Hot Topic.

I got back in the car and drove on into the desert. I glanced in the rear view mirror.

There was no outlet mall. Just a shimmering haze.

I'd just time traveled into the future of American retail.

Conflicted

The longer I work at a day job, the harder it is to remember my life pre-routine. Well, not remember, exactly. More like inhabit my identity. I recall the mechanics of it just fine—traipsing around the world with my laptop, researching where to find hotels or coffee shops with the best wifi. My office was my immediate line-of-sight. This I know intellectually. I just don't feel like that person at the moment.

I put little reminders of the other me up on my walls, both in Burbank and Jersey City. One of my Otomi textiles from my extended stay in San Miguel de Allende is too big for anywhere I live right now, and so it is in a box in storage, but the other one is tall and thin—perfect for my Burbank condo.

How to hang it was trickier, and I struggled with options, finally deciding I needed to go downtown to the mega-crafts store in DTLA. It's a bit like a low-rent super-Michael's, and I reasoned it might have a tapestry hanger. I caught the #222 bus over the hill to Hollywood and Argyle—which is, according to Metro signs, Hollywood and Vine—and took the Red Line down to Pershing Square.

After lunch at my favorite crepe place, I walked over to the crafts shop.
It didn't have anything helpful, so I glanced at my phone for the nearest art supply store. Great! There was one at 7th and Mateo. I headed east on 7th Street.

I thought nothing of the first tent I saw along the sidewalk. Lots of people live in tents in Los Angeles. Disconcerting, I know, but there is a severe housing problem in LA, and I have given up trying to understand why there seems to be no public will to create more affordable housing. My theory, based only on guesswork, is due to the weather, people survive here. In New York, if this many people lived on the streets, you'd be stepping over dead bodies all the time from December to March. That probably makes the homeless issue more pressing back home. But here, people just get herded into sections of town and under highways, where they live in tents.

After a few blocks, I was surrounded by tents and homeless people. The weather was sweltering, and many people sat under trees, with their dogs or in wheelchairs.

I was conflicted. Was I in over my head in the wrong part of town? Should I not even be here? Was it okay, me essentially wandering through people's yards?

I was more and more uncomfortable by the minute. A few people greeted me, but most people stared into space on this warm day. Was this safe? I didn't know what to think. I've wandered through impoverished areas all over the world, but this was likely the starkest contrast to the surroundings, just a few blocks from gentrifying, hipster DTLA. It was appalling, and yet, I know the solutions are too complex for anyone to sort out quickly.

I was thinking about the time I ended up wandering around in Republic of Congo in the middle of the night, after the train kept getting delayed and my bag had been slashed, and feeling exactly like I had then, concluding there was nowhere to go but straight ahead and this wasn't my best-ever decision, when the tents became fewer. I was out of Skid Row as quickly as I'd entered it. I finally took my phone out of my pocket to see how many blocks more I had to walk.

Not far. Just past the Greyhound terminal.

The Greyhound terminal! This was my first look at it since...1989? I'd come in from San Francisco not long after the last big earthquake, and my friend Marc Siry had picked me up on his motorcycle. In the middle of the night. In a part of town that still looked a little sketchy now after gentrification. He'd longed joked about picking me up there, and now I could see why.

I arrived at the art supply store, picked up some wood strips, Velcro, and a staple gun, and caught the bus back to the metro. As I glided past the tents in air-conditioned comfort, I reflected on how incredibly hot people must be in them. I know it's better to have a tent than to live in the open, but all I could do about the heat and the situation was shake my head. Pity is disrespectful, and I make it a point to try to deal with people as peers, but I was having a hard time avoiding it just this once. 

Hitting Home

Today's baseball field shooting took place where I grew up.

I don't mean in the same town (Alexandria) or the same neighborhood (Del Ray). I mean it was 3/4 of a block away from the row house I lived in from when I was four years old to when I went off to college.

I played in that field. The neighbor kids and I sang Monkees songs (we loved the TV repeats of the show) while swinging on the swingsets next to that field. I used to go to the YMCA across the parking lot. It's where I learned to swim as an after-school latchkey kid. (Not very well. I had to relearn in college.) We would take our dog for walks in that field. A small plane once crashed into that field. I slept through it, which is how I learned I am a skilled sleeper.

I broke my left arm on the monkey bars at that baseball park. My dad went to a turkey shoot and the neighbor took me and my mother to the hospital. We didn't think it was broken, because I could still move my fingers. Of course, we weren't exactly medical professionals. Lots of people can still move their fingers when they have a fracture or break. What did we know? We didn't have online reference yet.

My mother was mugged walking along that baseball field, and another time, my sister and mother were ambushed by drunk rednecks there (not coincidentally, the drunk rednecks were our next-door neighbors).

I have conflicted emotions about the area, since my childhood wasn't exactly idyllic, and I associate that area with a lot I'd prefer to forget, even as I strive to remember elusive but important traumatic moments.

I understand the area is gentrified and a lot safer now than it was then, but I guess it didn't feel that way today.

A Bit More Like Home

Home is still an 1895 row house in Lafayette, Jersey City, but I'm trying to make my Burbank condo a little more personalized.

Here is today's addition. Three plates I bought in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, in 2001, on the original MariesWorldTour.  I probably sent the plates home from Zambia, then I would've had Kraiger help me hang them at 350 Eighth Street before packing them into storage while I was off in Cairo, then unpacking into my rental on Hamilton Park, and packing up again in May 2015, leaving them in my First Street garage until a few weeks ago.

They didn't fit into my mini-kitchen in my Lafayette studio, but they fit just right here in Burbank. And they remind me that once upon a time, I did more with my life than work all the time.

On Location

I've been meaning to go to the Batcave since I first realized it was here, just a few minutes away in the Hollywood Hills, but I didn't get around to it until today.

Adam West was 88 years old--he lived a long life. Today we acknowledge his passing not because we're surprised at the death of an 88-year-old, and not solely because another part of our childhoods has moved on. (Most of us watched Batman in repeats, anyway.)

We mention it because of his iconic status in the industry many of us live and work in, our brushes with celebrity, standing next to him at functions, in elevators, at bars. My own Adam West story is pretty brief--he gave out a Harvey Award at a Dallas convention in 1993, and I presented for Marvel either right before him or right after him. I've forgotten, but we did shake hands.


Today signals an end to us accumulating silly stories about Adam West interactions and near-misses, so I headed up to Bronson Caves because today was not just as good a day as any, but a better day than most.

I caught the #222 bus over the hill to Hollywood, disembarking at Yucca and Vine. I walked up to Argyle and Franklin, where the DASH Hollywood was driving by, so I jumped on that to Franklin and Bronson, where I stopped by the Oaks for a quick lunch. I tried getting a Lyft up to the trailhead, but my phone reported a five-minute wait, so I just walked the 1.4 miles to the fire road to Bronson Caves.

Once you get to the trailhead, it's pretty much the world's easiest hike up to the caves. I could've done without walking back to Franklin, but I couldn't get a signal in Griffith Park. Oh well, walking is good for me, plus there's a decent Gelson's at Franklin and Bronson, so I picked up a few things on my way back to the #222 stop to go back over the hill to Burbank.

Look at this list of productions shot at the Batcave. It's tremendous, including even on of my favorite films, The Searchers. Even Little House on the Prairie ended up here.

Time Travel

The Other Marie was in town last week--I was back East for most of it (at BookExpo, formerly BEA), but I returned to spend some time with her before she flew home.

She'd rented an apartment in DTLA. It had two beds, so I stayed with her instead of dragging her back and forth to Burbank.
We went to LA Confidential at the Orpheum, wandered the streets where I had sublet when I first arrived in Los Angeles, ate at the Nickel Diner, and enjoyed briefly feeling like we had other lives.
"Downtown is so much like our old neighborhood," Marie marveled, referring to our Avenue B places back in the nineties. (There's even a Two Boots, which was a thing before it was a thing.)
On Sunday morning, we walked to the metro. We were heading to Culver City to meet our friend Steve—formerly of East 10th Street in Manhattan, among other places.

Two men approached us, walking the other way.

They glanced over.

"The ladies of 7th Street are pretty," said one.

The comment hung in the air, as we thought about the old days in the East Village, when men said strange things and young women (which we were then) smiled nervously or looked the other way.

"Yeah, but a lot of them are hookers," said the other, as he looked us up and down.

Small Victories

BBF sometimes gets pretty tired of me saying "Let's fix this today." Most people relax by watching television, I guess.

Here's what I made him do with me today. We fetched Burmese puppets from my garage, went to the DIY store and found some anchors, and put these up in my little JC studio.

I love my Burmese puppets. 

Bike to Work Day

Burbank hosted its annual Bike and Walk to Work Day today. For me, that's just "going to work," but one of the three pit stops was in front of my office building, so I stopped in and browsed the public information tables set up by the police department, fire department, cycle advocacy groups, local hospital, and public transit info center.

I politely took flyers about buses I already know well, entered the drawing for a folding bike, and got some good swag--a little light clip for bike handlebars and a flashing reflector.

Then, at the far end of the gallery of tents, I saw a row of used bicycles.

A local nonprofit called Burbank Bike Angels had set these bikes up, and was accepting donations in exchange for them.

I studied the bikes carefully--a men's Specialized, several Schwinn bikes, lots of one-speeds.

There's a bike parking area in my new building's parking garage, but I'd barely ever ridden the last bike I'd had and was unlikely to ride one here. There aren't many bike lanes and this is car country.

"How much are the bikes?" I asked.

"Whatever you donate," was the response.

I took a flyer and went upstairs, where I spoke to one of the other group editors who had bought a bike six months ago and then never used it.

"That's exactly what would happen to me," I said.

But about five minutes later, I changed my mind, went downstairs, and gave the sixty dollars I had in my pocket over in exchange for a purple Schwinn.

I parked it on the bike rack in the office garage, and it was still there at the end of the day. Only now it had a note admonishing me to buy a lock. Ha. Okay. Thanks, anonymous person.

I rode the bike home at twilight down back streets, balancing on my inappropriately tall clogs while trying to stop my handbag from sliding down onto the handlebars.

Here is Red the purple bike, currently residing in my living room while awaiting a lock. I don't know how long I'll manage to keep this until it is stolen even WITH a lock, but at least I know where to get a new one for cheap.

Don't Ask Unless You Really Want an Answer

I sometimes get carried away with instructions.

In my defense, the electrician did ask where I wanted the lights to go.