Now that I’m back in Los Angeles, it was only inevitable, I suppose, that I would shutter the doors here and begin a new L.A.-themed blog. That has been done and you may preview the new blog, a work in progress over the next few days here. Get ready to reset your bookmarks and RSS feeds soon.
Another Day in NELA
Arroyo Seco Regional Library
Ambled down to the Arroyo Seco Regional Library in Highland Park on Figueroa this afternoon, a handsome affair of stone and wrought-iron. I cannot secure a library card until my California ID is renewed (which we are headed over to Pasadena via Metro to accomplish tomorrow morning) so I just had a quick look-see, picked up a pamphlet on biking trails in L.A. and a flyer for a May 14 Peace in the Northeast Rally (“Our community of Northeast Los Angeles has been in the spotlight for its violence, drugs, and gangs. In response to this, many of our local churches, neighborhood councils, government agencies, community groups, business owners and local residents have come in unity and are declaring in one voice PEACE IN THE NORTHEAST!”). The rally features a “Basketball Shooting” contest with L.A. Clippers star Al-Farouq Amino.
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Returned our DVD rental of The Green Hornet to the Blockbuster kiosk at the 99 Cents Store, picked up a few snack items and headed home; earlier in the ady I enjoyed a telephone conference with a friend and colleague with whom I may be embarking on a non-fiction book proposal, in all likelihood for the California Arts Council.
This evening I sent a query to the Primary Research Group, a new York-based educational group that produces reports on higher education and libraries in the U.S. They need freelance journos, according to their ad on Journalism Jobs.com, at the rate of 8 to 12 cents per hour with “royalty payments after two completed assingments.” That’s well below my usual rate of 50 cents-per-word for trade magazine work but I need to get some quick revenue-producing work in the door within the next week or two … we have $300.00 to get us by until June 3 and $26.00 of that goes out to DMV tomorrow for my ID (plus the MTA fare for transportation).
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And wouldn’t you know that less than one month after returning to L.A. I have an idea for a spec screenplay? Screenwriting, the business I swore I was finished with when I left L.A. It’s all because we watched The King’s Speech a few nights ago and I paused to reflect that in my screenwriting years, the two times that I came the nearest to making a big sale were with projects that had a literary pedigree; one was a modernist western called Serpentine, a loose adaptation of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf, and the other was a proposed HBO limited-run series based on Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby Stories.
What I learned all those years ago while toiling in the Hollywood grape fields is that at the end of the day the guy who produced Fast and Furious 5 would feel greater self-respect if he had produced, say, Sense and Sensibility or Les Miserables, something his grandma would be proud of, but since these folks, as a general rule, are not terribly well-read (recalling the incident in Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon when movie mogul Monroe Stahr, preparing for a meeting with writers’ union organizer Brimmer, has ‘the script department work-up a synopsis of The Communist Manifesto for him) so it’s up to the writer to present the producer with a project based on highbrow material.
The project I have in mind is very literary and titled Red Darkness. Will I write it? Hell if I know. But there must be a reason I still have Final Draft screenwriting software on my laptop.
One Glorious Evening at La Rotonde
I submitted an entry for the latest PEN Shorts contest but did not win (my previous entry, Bluebeard in Latex, was a runner-up winner a few backs back); below is the “prompt” — the inspiring image for the short prose competition provided by PEN American Center – followed by my original 299 word entry (incidentally, the first piece of original fiction I’ve composed since arriving back in Los Angeles). Click on the photo to read the winning entry, Fading, an outstanding poem by C. Wallace Walker.
(c) From the photographic collection “The Disappearing Sicily” (photo by Giacomo Pirozzi, 1989)
“One Glorious Evening at La Rotonde“, 299 wds.
By Rodger Jacobs (Los Angeles, California)
Planchon walked the length of the Isle St.-Louis, stopping at the bookstall along the quais opposite Notre-Dame to read the headlines from Le Figaro, thumbtacked to a bulletin board crafted from spent wine bottle corks. In a story below the fold of the front page he noted with great sadness that a minor poet had eased into the hereafter last night, one of the rare surviving links to les Annees Folles, the Crazy Years, at the beginning of the 20th century, when Montparnasse was the heart of intellectual and artistic life in Paris, the Paris of Zola, Picasso, Modigliani, Duchamp, Cocteau.
Planchon remembered those times well, when cafes like La Croserie des Lilas and La Coupole were the places where a starving artist could occupy a table from dawn to dusk for only a few centimes; he never rose above the rank of “starving poet” but the evening that Max Ernst stood on a table in La Rotonde, declaring that a poem Planchon scribbled on the back of a grease-stained bakery receipt represented the emergence of a new and important voice in French verse, was a night only the grave would compel him to forget. What an event! Barmaids proposed marriage, the proprietor stood him for glass after glass of champagne, and the American writer Ernest Hemingway shook Planchon’s hand.
Planchon collected a comfortable pension after a lifetime working for La Poste, lugging mail over the boulevards of Paris, but he had no regrets. He would do it all again for that one glorious evening at La Rotonde.
He shook an unfiltered Gitanes from a crumpled pack in his hip pocket, struck a match against the bullletin board, lit the cigarette. He started down the quais toward the cafes, thinking he might dine on a piece of fish for lunch, perhaps with a cold glass of Chardonnay.
Don Quixote Shares His Sorrow … and Joy
Over at the LA Eastside blog, our friend Don Quixote shares the story of the love of his life, who passed away on April 2. Please read DQ’s heartbreaking Lovers Never Say Goodbye.
Dusty’s, Highland Park
It’s 3:30 on a Friday afternoon and we’re knocking back ice cold Bud longnecks at Dusty’s Bar on York Boulevard. Two-fifty apiece, Happy Hour prices. It doesn’t get any better than that.
My buddy and colleague Joe O’Brien has endured the long crawl from sun-baked Van Nuys to Highland Park to help celebrate my return to L.A. after my long exile in Las Vegas. There are about fifteen other patrons in the dark, drab bar, an exclusive cast of locals and hardcore booze hounds with colorful faces and, no doubt, equally colorful lives. The bar is a serpentine-shaped affair with more twists and curves than a Raymond Chandler novel. There’s an internet jukebox over my left shoulder that is bellowing Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire. The two big-screen plasma TVs behind the bar are tuned to ESPN. There is a fully-stocked back bar with three glass shelves of glistening bottles of booze and the requisite Virgin Mary votive candle (this is, after all, a predominantly Hispanic community); a wrought-iron shelf hosts bags of peanuts and El Sabroso pork cracklins, the type that come with little plastic packets of hot sauce inside.
“This used to be a cop bar back in the day,” I tell Joe. “In fact, one of the original owners was Joseph Wambaugh.”
Joe asks me to remind him who Wambaugh is while staring at a sign behind the bar that reads, “Warning! Reality is only an illusion that occurs due to lack of alcohol.”
“A former LAPD cop,” I tell Joe, “became a writer back in the Seventies: The New Centurions, The Choirboys, The Onion Field …”
A devout cinemaphile, Joe nods his head in recognition at the last title. We step outside to the smoking patio, a slab of concrete adjoining the parking lot with a haphazard gathering of aged bar stools, for a cigarette. Within a few moments Joe and I are joined by a bent and withered old man in faded jeans, dirty tee-shirt, and a sweat-stained baseball cap that announces his service in the Vietnam War; beneath a slim silver mustache, two of his front teeth are missing. His bloodshot blue eyes sparkle when he sees me and he extends a hand excitedly.
“Where the hell have you been, man?” He pumps my hand. “I haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“I’ve been away from L.A. for a few years,” I tell him, which is true, but I’ve never met this man in my life, which makes for an odd, awkward, and, in its own way, uniquely surreal moment.
To Be Continued
