Benedictions

In Defense Of Indifference

William Timberman2 Comments

We’re a quarter of a century into our new millennium. The Germans are eating less sausage, the French are drinking less wine, the Russians are trying to reverse-engineer 1991, and in the United States, our self regard has been abruptly terminated by an opera buffa Mussolini with a mouth like a guppy, and a face dipped in what looks like orange finger-paint. (Mussolini was an opera buffa character himself, of course, but the Italians invented opera, and they’ll always be better at it than anyone else.)

Despite what our newly-minted neofascist pundits are screaming at us these days, it isn’t time to re-think our principles, especially not at the behest of people who openly despise both thinking and principles. We already know what we need to know, namely that while we may not outlast them, our principles most definitely will. The rest is just noise.

Stereotypes

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In search of Lost Angeles, May 18, 2025

My daughter was 13, a latch-key kid coming of age in San Jose in the late 80s, and she needed regalia. LA had regalia, lots of regalia. LA was the queen of regalia.

“Daddy,” she said over the phone. “Na Na? I’ve heard good things. A care package would be welcome.” And so the journey began….

Na Na was in Santa Monica, a block or so up Broadway from Ocean Avenue. It’d been over 20 years since I’d lived in nearby Venice, but thanks to frequent visits to the metropolis I still thought of as my spiritual home, I hadn’t completely lost my neighborhood chops. Besides, even that late in the 80s, finding parking on the street in Santa Monica wasn’t totally impossible, especially if you knew where to look, and you didn’t mind walking a little.

Since I absolutely did know where to look, and I’d never minded walking, one Saturday afternoon shortly after my daughter’s Obi-Wan call I found myself standing just inside the entrance to Na Na, nervously checking my teenage punk/goth shopping list, feeling as though I’d just disembarked on another planet for the first time, totally unprepared for the sensory assault that awaited me.

First came the smells—aromatherapy candles, soaps and essential oils, an amalgam of herbal, floral, quasi-culinary scents that defied classification. It reminded me more of the potpourri of spices, ghee, and mustard oil at my then favorite Indian market in Northridge than the clothing department at the Broadway or I Magnin’s. It was otherworldly in its own dark way, but like Bombay Spiceland, it hinted openly at hitherto unexplored possibilities.

The music too was impressive—very non-elevator, very anti-elevator, in fact—although in the interest of commerce, it was more sonorous than loud. I don’t remember what specifically was playing—a track from Peepshow, maybe, or from Disintegration. Something very like them, anyway.

Architecture took over the introduction then, or more accurately a blend of architecture and set design. It began with the naked walls and exposed ductwork of the building itself, and ended in flourishes of chain link-fencing, acetylene torch-cut steel partitions. and bare-bulb lighting fixtures suspended on chains and shielded by galvanized sheet-metal hoods. Regarded purely as a stage it appeared to be part junkyard, part 19th century waterfront warehouse, and part social club for affluent suburban vampires. I felt right at home.

I didn’t look it, of course—a man in his mid-forties, in his gimme cap, jeans and denim jacket phase—I could see the help wondering if I’d taken a wrong turn at Bakersfield, maybe, or decided to pop in for a visit on my way to a casting call.

The help. All beautiful young women, as one expects behind the counters in such upscale outlets everywhere, but doubly so in LA. Since Na Na was more Siouxsie than Barbie, dark hair was the look here, not blonde, and fiercely petite, warily cosmopolitan rather than bouncy was the mode.

As I folded my list and began my march to the interior, the nearest salesperson peeled away from her counter and came toward me with a straightforward “May I help you?” There wasn’t the slightest hint just how irretrievably beyond anyone’s help she’d already judged me to be.

I was grateful for her forbearance, especially since it took me a moment to recover my composure enough to answer her. The dress code at Na Na was both elaborate and precise. My prospective guide on this adventure had a frosted-tip sunburst magenta hairdo that could have inspired the iron throne, a spiked patent leather dog collar, black lipstick, white eyeshadow, a sheer spider-web silver and black blouse with onyx skull buttons that matched her earrings, and a brocaded shadow panel bustier underneath. Also a miniskirt and hose with a net pattern that echoed her blouse, and knee-high lace-up black boots with what looked like at least thirty pairs of eyelets. I had to remind myself my role here was remote shopper for a teenager with dreams, not understudy in the epic remake of the Judgment of Paris.

The rest was all business. Pointy creepers of a certain size, with a particular thickness of translucent wavy gum rubber sole. The ones with the plain black vamp, not with the white or the faux leopard skin one. Two sheer scarves, one magenta, one chartreuse. One embroidered velveteen jacket with mini chains. Two pairs of spider web panty hose in a certain size, one pair of articulated skeleton earrings, one pair of safety-pin earrings—both pairs for pierced ears. Two tubes of lipstick, one dark magenta, one black, and hair tinting supplies (Has her Mom approved of this? Will I catch hell if she hasn’t?)

An hour of this. My guide was gentle with me, no smirking, no sighing, no raised eyebrows. The rest of the crew, those not serving other customers, kept a respectful distance, but I knew they’d have questions once the cracker apparition was finally out the door.

Years later, I asked my daughter if she remembered my intrepid solo trip to Na Na. She did. “What I’ve wondered ever since,” I said, “is why this young woman actually bothered to be nice to me.”

“One, she was getting paid to be nice, and two, maybe she decided to take pity on a cross dresser with ambitions so obviously above his station. You know, empathy—she’s a punk, you’re a weirdo, maybe there’s a little solidarity going on there.”

“Seems implausible, but it is what it is, I guess. Sometimes the illusion of sincerity works just as well as sincerity itself. Beats the hell out of stereotyping either way.”

From 1995: Ziggurats

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Post-modern architecture comes to the campus—from a previous incarnation on the Web

Anywhere you look in the Nineties, you’ll find the whimsies of Post-Modernism grinning back at you. Every mall seems to evoke the Forum Romanum, every apartment block the baths of Caracalla.

It’s a clever sort of classicism, but not a rich one. With little money available in modern times for marble, let alone for craftsmen willing to spend their lives chipping away at acanthus leaves, the glory of imperial Rome is only hinted at.

Which, I gather, is exactly the intent. Post-Modern architects claim no allegiance to a particular style; their stated passion is to reintroduce the decorative element into architectural design, to abandon the idea of the city as a “machine for living” in favor of something that won’t give us all nightmares.

Ironic quotations from the past would nevertheless seem to be an essential element of their designs; without them the architect would be vulnerable to the charge of bad decoration, or worse still, of dishonesty. (Stone is stone. Prestressed concrete isn’t. “Form follows function,” etc.) By impudently placing a column where no column could possibly be, Philip Johnson can justifiably claim to be as candid as Van der Rohe about the distinction between the structural and the “merely” decorative.

In any event, the products of more than ten years of Post-Modern construction are now all around us, and the surprising thing is that many of them actually seem to work pretty well.

On the University of California campus where I earn my living, most of the recent buildings are Post-Modern. With their porticos and exterior staircases, their friezes of semi-engaged columns or sunken windows set into beveled architraves, they resemble — at least from a distance — the modest public buildings of a state capital in the Midwest.

On closer inspection, the classical illusion is tempered by the realization that the columns are shells over steel beams, the architraves stucco over styrofoam; that the rooftops above the tiled eaves are burdened with roaring machinery and impossibly large exhaust funnels.

Nevertheless, with their exterior walls painted in shades of pink, sienna, and pale gray-green to match the eucalyptus trees which surround them, their staircases faced in polychrome Mediterranean tile, these pseudo-Roman exercises seem much more restful, more human, than the angular modernist monstrosities from the Sixties which stand beside them.

We’re told that imperial Rome was also painted, that brick and tile were as much a feature of its public facades as marble. Crossing the grass quadrangle between “Physical Sciences North” and “Physical Sciences South,” I’d like to think so. It would help explain why I can imagine men in togas standing under these porticos, or coming down these staircases, something which I could never imagine on the steps of the grand white palaces of Washington.

The illusion of less complicated times lingers for a moment, then I realize that if this were truly Rome, there’d be a long row of monuments to Republican senators along the edge of quadrangle, or perhaps an equally long row of crucified Christians. That, I suspect, would constitute more irony than the architect intended, or the public relations office on our campus would be willing to endure.

Near Miss

William Timberman

In search of Lost Angeles, February 8, 2025

A view of some buildings and cars on the road.

It was maybe an hour after dark one Friday evening early in 1976 as my wife and I headed east on the Santa Ana Freeway, bound for a weekend visit to my in-law’s house in Corona. I was in front, behind the wheel of our brand new, rallye-yellow VW Dasher. My wife was in the back, tending to our nearly year-old daughter in her bucket-shaped car seat.

Traffic was surprisingly moderate for the beginning of a weekend. I was cruising in the left lane at just over seventy miles an hour as we approached the Los Angeles River on our way to the San Bernardino freeway junction. Suddenly an enormous Oldsmobile station wagon with its lights out appeared crosswise in the lane ahead of us, with four or five young people seemingly trying with little success to push it out of the way of oncoming traffic.

Terrified, I instinctively hauled the steering wheel as far to the right as I could, feeling the car flex and go up on three wheels as I did. Once safely past the moment of imminent collision, and fearful of what might be approaching from behind us in the lane I’d just blindly swerved into, I hauled the steering wheel back sharply to the left and felt the uplifted rear wheel thump back down on the pavement behind me as we swept past the iconic sheds and storage tanks of the defunct Brew 102 brewery to our right. A little more than an hour later we’d arrived safely at our destination, and my daughter’s grandparents got to fawn over their granddaughter again without even the slightest inkling of how near the angel of death had come to visiting all of us that evening.

Years later I read in some auto magazine that the intentionally flexible unibody construction of the VW Dasher and its Audi 80 stablemate allowed them to recover surprisingly reliably from abrupt steering inputs like those I’d been forced to make use of that evening. German engineering may no longer be what it once was, and the iconic Brew 102 brewery complex has long since been demolished, but as Los Angeles memories go, it would be hard to come up with one more emblematic of the ambiguities of life in the post-war Southern California capital of la dolce vita. The living was certainly easy enough—jobs were plentiful, the sun reliable, the beaches close-by. The fact that sudden death in a river of steel was also only a couple of miles or so from the door of every suburban garage seemed comically irrelevant, at least until you experienced your first genuinely near miss.

Film Criticism (Of a Sort)

William Timberman

So I find myself netflicking again the other night, looking for something to rest my weary eyes on after another long day spent reading and writing on that radiant little iPad of mine. Ah, here we go then, a new one of those geriatric menaces with Liam Neeson in it. This time he’s to be a hit man (what else) retired in a village full of innocents the producer seems to have borrowed from the Banshees of Inisherin. It does also have Ciarán Hinds and Colm Meaney in it, though, so maybe….

Turns out it’s quite satisfying—serious enough to portray a character who has as hard a time as any of us figuring out if it’s his death or his life catching up with him, and wise enough to cast a superb Kerry Condon as the young harridan with a revolver who helps him with the final bit of calculation. It’s not quite Inisherin, but it doesn’t embarrass itself.

It’s called In the Land of Saints and Sinners, and it’s on Prime. It wouldn‘t kill you to have a look at it.

Ars Gratia Artis Ain’t the Half of It

William Timberman

The sarabande from Bach’s cello suite no. 2 in D minor, BWV 1008, was my first glimpse into the one abyss that human beings can always look into with confidence that their eternal immaturity will be respected. Music is the abyss that looks back into us without any attempt to claim dominion over us, the abyss that offers us a rare chance to defeat entropy. Music isn’t always destined to soothe the savage beast in us—every once in a while it escapes the definitions we’ve reserved for it and confirms the fundamental savagery of our right to exist in a universe filled with marvels that otherwise might remain beyond us in every way.

In Search of Lost Angeles—December 27, 2024

William Timberman

58 years ago a twenty year-old Mike Davis taught me to love LA. Even then he was a sharply critical lover of that magical place, so I’m not sure how it was that, despite his tutelage, my love for LA came to be so much less critical than his. Like Randy Newman, I loved LA without reservation, and kept loving it even when, roughly 25 years after I last saw Mike, I found myself reading my library’s copy of City of Quartz and nodding along in agreement as I followed his historical analysis of what I’d long since thought of as his city far more legitimately than it had been mine.

These days, I live in Arizona, feeling much more exile than expatriate, even on my good days, for reasons anyone who’s spent any time in Dogtown will understand. I’ve long wanted to thank Mike publicly for his exuberant gift to my younger self, but not having the patience to write memoirs, and being temperamentally unsuited to the writing of eulogies, I never got around to it while he was alive, and couldn’t bring myself to commit to it in the days after he passed, as surfing on his hard-earned fame as a public intellectual seemed a rotten way to honor his memory.

So let me do this instead: For anyone who lives in LA for any length of time, and responds to it as I did, memory becomes a sort of protean creature, one which with or without their consent claims a small but significant share of their consciousness. One can never tell for sure whether what one remembers is something lived in the flesh, experienced vicariously in a darkened movie theater, or simply appears unbidden as an inexplicably alchemical fusing of the two.

This, then, is the introduction to a series of small, but haunted Los Angeles memories that have affected me more deeply over time than I had any reason to expect when they first came to me. They’re personal, of course, not necessarily having any significance for anyone but me, but I offer them here for any others who may find them resonant—you’ll know who you are. Above all, though, they’re my thanks to the Mike I still remember from those long ago days when we were both impossibly young, who long before he had any thought of leaving the life he lived so furiously, gifted me with this oddly Southern California capacity for double vision that I’ve treasured ever since.

Yeah. Okay. Fine.

William Timberman7 Comments

Kamala. She’s not Trump. I get it. More importantly, she’s overcome the obvious disadvantages, even in California, of her race and gender, and like President Obama before her, she’s visibly ambitious, with the talent, the intelligence, and the courage to realize those ambitions in a system designed to discriminate against people like her. Also like President Obama she seems to have managed to steer her way through the myriad corruptions set out in our system to trap the ambitious without succumbing to any of them as thoroughly as many of her peers.

Given the limitations of the Presidency, she’ll do. She’s got my vote. What would be nice, though, is if we’d all stop for a moment and look beyond the hagiography and see that we’ve been beating a dead horse politically for decades now with no resolution in sight. Kamala won’t help us with that. She can’t. She owes things to people, and we aren’t those people. We’re the people who can’t survive the decadence, the corruption, the cluelessness about the future that both parties are obliged by their true allegiances to defend, the hostages they’ve all given to fortune to get where they are today. Politics is not a consumer good, it’s a slow motion conflict about who gets to decide how we approach the future. We forget that at our peril.

John Gruber Gets It

William Timberman

For an old Mac guy, John Gruber, bless his heart, has always done his damndest to be fair in his judgments about tech. After several days of watching some of my favorite tech columnists lift their legs on iPads in general, and the new iPads in particular, reading his review of Apple’s M4 iPad Pro pretty much made me jump for joy.

I’m typing this on my new M4 iPad Pro with a nano-textured screen, and I don’t care what anybody says—the little girl in Apple’s “What’s a computer?” ad of 2017 got it, and John Gruber, prince of the grumpy old Mac diehards that he is, also gets it. He’s made my day….

Full disclosure: I’m 30 years older than John, and far grumpier, but the iPad still has the power to make me want to live another hundred years. That little girl—and John—speak to me, and for me, and I suspect I’m not alone.