Silverlake Blvd.

Summer 2018 movies

 

2001 in 70mm at the Cinerama Dome, Fosse Fosse Fosse at the Billy Wilder (“On Broadway” and “Who’s got the pain?”), A Place in the Sun at Backyard Bijou, The Apartment (newly restored), and Kinemacolor shorts (rescued from oblivion by L’Immagine Ritrovata) at Reel Thing 2018.

 

And at home, festivals of Satyajit Ray, and Fred and Ginger. Rather than their famous adagio dances, I got into their swing numbers: together, Ginger singing solo, and Fred at the piano).

 

[Image: Reel Thing’s high point of hilarity: a presentation on subtitles good, bad and ugly by Bruce Goldstein (of Film Forum & Rialto Pictures)]

Sunset Junction

 

I celebrated the 34^th anniversary of arriving in Silver Lake by walking around Sunset Junction. I guess I hadn’t done this in a while. Lots of changes …

 

New (to me):

• Blue Star Donuts & Coffee,
• La Colombe café (formerly Casbah Café)
• Creatures of Comfort women’s clothing (formerly Reform School)
• Depop online vintage clothing brick & mortar venue,
• Kettle Black Italian restaurant,
• MOTA (Medicine of the Angels, formerly Circus of Books)
• The Odelles women’s clothing,
• Roo Coffee,

 

Under construction:

• The Vica condos at the bottom of Micheltorena,
• Parachute,
• A Doc Marten shop,
• Wildfang clothes (“Home for badass women”),
• An office/retail building designed by Neil Denari!

 

Barkeepers, the source of so many birthday presents, was closed, the entire shop packed in boxes, ready to move to its new home on Hoover.

 

There was a line of people snaking around Undefeated, with a doorman with a guest list. For the release of retro Air Jordans?

 

Millies – expanded down the block from the single counter I dined at long ago – was also packed, with a line of people waiting.

 

Silver Lake was the first place I lived in L.A. After that I was in Venice, and then in Koreatown, then Los Feliz. But I came back. I've been in the same place for 17 years (another anniversary).

 

I’m not offended or depressed by the changes, but bemused.

 

And I'm apprehensive. I witnessed the wave of gentrification in the ‘80’s, that ended in the Black Monday crash of 1987. The transformation seemed unstoppable until it came to an abrupt, unexpected halt. The 99 Cent store took over the funky neighborhood grocery store, and the new shops sat abandoned and empty until the next wave.

Silver Lake Trader Joe's, August 7, 2018

Steven Vanhauwaert @ Zipper Hall

 

Vanhauwaert’s PianoSpheres concert of 20^th century piano music from Italy was a lesson in the importance of hearing music live. I went because I wanted to hear Busoni and Scelsi. But they weren’t what I left with. No: it was the pieces by Pratella and Bussotti - things I assumed were going to be trifles that are still resonating.

 

The other lesson was how important it is for virtuoso performers to research and seek out unplayed – even unpublished – works. Vanhauwaert had to commission his own copy of the manuscript of Francesco Balilla Pratella’s “La Guerra,” composed a year after his 1912 manifesto Musica Futurista. I expected campy militaristic bombast with sound effects, but Vanhauwaert presented a work that was subversive by being lighthearted. It should be a standard.

 

Sylvano Bussotti, - best known (!?) for a score reproduced at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus – was represented by a “Preludo,” that was engagingly introspective. The piece is also unpublished, and SV had to cajole the composer for it, who doubted it was playable. It was and it was worth it.

 

Back

 

Offline all summer. I even went back to pen and paper for a few weeks. 

 

For a good case study of the current media environment, I recommend Andrew O’Hagan’s account of the Grenfell Tower fire in the London Review of Books. Not easy reading.

Mapping No-Man’s Land

 

See my review of Thomas Dilworth’s “David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet”. Thanks to LARB for another opportunity to steep myself in work that had tantalized me for years.

 

[Image: David Jones, Chart of sources for Arthurian legends, 1943, from the Tate’s website]