Yesterday I thought--for the first time in, literally, years--about my grandparents' pink kitchen in the Massachusetts house my grandfather built, by hand, using GI Bill money after his service in World War II.  The pink of my grandparents' kitchen was a very specific pink, not hot pink, not Pepto-Bismol pink, not rose, not baby pink, but a rich true-pink color that was popular in the 1950's.  Look at color photos from the '50's and '60's, or magazine ads from that era, and you will see appliances and furniture and fabric in that shade.  The cabinets, floor, and walls in my grandparents' kitchen were painted that mod pink when I was a small child.

Because we now live in the age of Google, the instant I thought of my grandparents' pink kitchen, I Googled "pink kitchens" and learned a) that pink was a popular mod color, b) once upon a time you
could buy almost anything in that shade, and c) there are people today who love that color, particularly in vintage kitchens, and those aficionados have created Pinterest pages devoted to mod pink kitchens.

Naturally I clicked a link and proceeded immediately to Pinterest, and there viewed a variety of pink-painted vintage kitchens, as well as pink refrigerators and pink blenders and pink
dishes.  I had a strange sense of traveling through time because, as stated above, this was a very specific shade of pink.  Gazing at the "pink kitchen" pictures on Pinterest, I returned to my grandparents' old kitchen via memories that were more textured and three-dimensional than any I had conjured before consulting the Pinterest pages.

I am a recent convert to Pinterest.  A month ago a friend and fellow author (Jack Witt, "Cut, Cool & Confident" and "Tight, Tone & Trim") suggested that I create a Pinterest site for inspiration and to promote my books.  Jack's advice is usually spot-on, so I created a Pinterest site (it was quite simple) and then a few "boards".  The concept of Pinterest--a highly visual environment--is that you post or search for images (sketches, paintings, or photos) of items that interest you, and you then "pin" each image to a "board".  If you like soccer,
for example, Pinterest allows you to "pin" your own soccer photos, and others' soccer images, to a virtual corkboard that you name something such as "Soccer".  Other Pinterest users--called "Pinners"--can view your boards (unless you designate them as "Secret" and allow access only to friends).  Other Pinners can "favorite" and "share" and "pin" your images.  Theycan follow your "boards" and you can follow their "boards".

Pinterest won me over quickly.  It was simple and intuitive to set up, and simple and intuitive to create boards.  At its most basic level, it's like a virtual scrapbook.  If you like the theater, you can pin images of theater marquees, posters, press releases, and cast photos.  It you like a certain city--let's say, for example, Philadelphia--you can pin images of its landmarks, landscapes, and famous people.  If you like jazz, let the jazz-image pinning begin!

For visual people--and most of us are, to some degree or another; it's hard-wired into us to help us recognize and elude danger--Pinterest rapidly becomes more addictive than, well, anything else
(name your poison).  Once you create your boards and populate them with images, you want to find more images.  And then more.  Pinterest is a deep, deep rabbit hole that branches off in myriad directions.  The images you encounter suggest other images, and even other boards.  Like a hunter stalking its prey or an artist pursuing a muse, you scour Pinterest for that perfect image of, say, a ballet slipper.  Or a banjo.  Or a Peruvian basekt.  Or a Christmas tree in the snow.  Or an Irish Setter.  There are so many things to seek and collect, and each discovery sparks another idea.  Before you know it hours have passed and you have created multiple boards and collected hundreds--even thousands--of images.
 
At its most basic, Pinterest is a virtual scrapbooking site.  But it quickly grows to much more than that.  Before you know it, you are a gallery, even a museum, curating collections.  The
"boards" become collections and rooms and wings of your virtual gallery, your virtual museum.  Pinning is an exciting and rewarding endeavor, and when you have completed each hunter-gatherer-curator session, you actually have something to show for it.  Something instructive.  Something beautiful.  Something moving, even.

And so I pen this blog, a complete and unapologetic Pinterest addict--although I prefer the term "curator".  And I encourage you to join the Pinner ranks.  Pinterest is free, simple, educational, and inspirational.  It will give you ideas for your own projects, whether you are an artist, mom, mechanic, gardner, musician, athlete, or historian.  It will give you a forum to collect your favorite images of bottle caps or fans or gardens or statues or parkour moves or jars of jam or Civil War battlefields--anything that interests you, anything you care to imagine.  And it allows you to share all the wonders that you collect, your Aladdin's caves of treasure, with other Pinners and
even with non-Pinners (who are allowed limited yet intoxicating glimpses of the visual riches Pinterest holds).

Perhaps most wonderfully of all, Pinterest can transport us to other times and places.  A cafe in Paris.  A library in London.  A garden in Tokyo.  A farm in the 1920's heartland.  Anywhere.  Even to our own pasts.  As when I view a snowy street in Germany.  Or pink kitchens like the one in which my grandparents' cooked for us and made us laugh.

We do indeed live in an amazing age, a nearly magical age.  The world comes to our computers, and we can find and create and share beauty with everyone around the globe.  It is a new era.  An age of Pinteresting times.
 
[You can follow the author's Pinterest boards at http://www.pinterest.com/leslemonauthor.]

It’s difficult for us, in the present day, to picture what the 1920’s were like, but we all have iconic images stamped in our minds from history books and movies and PBS documentaries and, of course, cartoons.

We think of a college kid in a raccoon coat and pork pie hat, waving a pennant and saying nonsensical things like “23 Skidoo”.  We think of a flapper in strands of beads, madly dancing the Charleston on a marble-topped bar.  We think of big tin automobiles with hand-cranks, juddering and clanking along dirt roads that were even then being paved and laced with electrical and telephone wires.  We think of champagne and gin and hot jazz, a party that never seemed to end.  We think of the stock market, soaring up and up, no one dreaming it could crash so hard.

By and large, these images have truth.  You can hear the mad, mobile merriment of the age in its music, and you can hear the music on Buena Vista Street, peppy tunes like “Shake That Thing”.  We had won World War I, and everyone was dancing in the 1920’s. Progress was in full swing, and the thing to be was modern. Everyone moved to the cities and talked slang and played the market and moved fast and had unlimited confidence in the future. We were industrializing, electrifying, motorizing, refrigerating,
agitating, and animating.  Cartoons were the perfect medium to communicate the zany speed of the new age, and the possibility of the impossible that it promised.

Los Angeles was humming with endless possibility when Walt arrived in 1923.  Former ditch-digger William Mulholland had brought water to LA—seemingly all the water it would ever need—by 1913.  Dirt roads had given way to paved roads, gas to electricity, horses to automobiles—Downtown LA had installed more than 30 traffic signals by 1923.  Real estate was booming, oil was flowing, and the moving picture industry was about to explode.

Walt Disney moved to LA at a golden moment, a perfect match of personality and place.  He was an optimist among optimists, a dreamer and doer among dreamers and doers ...

[From "Buena Vista Street" in "The Disneyland Book of Secrets 2015 - DCA" - To be released Sep. 2015.]

Yesterday I saw Friday the 13th for the first time. I mean the original Friday the 13th, the movie that was released in 1980.  I didn’t sneak into the movies to see it in 1980, when I was thirteen, and somehow I never caught it on VHS or cable or DVD during the next 34 years.  Yes--Friday the
13th is 34 years old.  Chew on that if you want to feel ancient!

 While I write I typically keep the television or radio on for background noise, for company.  If a really good (or entertainingly bad) show airs, I’ll pause in my writing, a few minutes here, a few minutes there, to enjoy key scenes and plot points.  At times a real gem will sweep me away and the writing will be forgotten. Chinatown can do that, for example, every time, as perfect and minimalist a film as has ever been crafted.  I would have bet strong odds that Friday the 13th would not have been able to commandeer my attention—but yesterday I would have lost that bet.

 Friday the 13th is not a great movie.  In many ways it is a terrible movie (and not the cool terrible, as in "You’re terrible, Muriel.”)  But Friday the 13th has a sort of hypnotic pull, and having seen it now, I understand why it spawned a multiplicity of sequels and reboots as well as (eventually) an iconic villain.

What drew me in first was the classic purity of the set-up.  There is a place, nicknamed “Camp Blood,” that is supposed to be a bad place, where awful, even supernatural things happen.  You are not supposed to go there.  So, naturally, the film begins with a cadre of energetic and cheerful young people--not bad, but irreverent--headed toward this accursed place for the express purpose of reopening the camp!

There.  That’s the launch of so many horror and ghost tales, going back thousands of years.  There is a forbidden place, and there is a cheerful innocent—in this case, a pack of cheerful innocents—who will disturb the place.  Nothing but slaughter can ensue.

 I was next drawn in by the realization that Kevin Bacon—yes, that Kevin Bacon—was among the cheerful innocents headed to the slaughter. While he was in no danger of being nominated for an Academy Award, Bacon’s was the only performance in the film that seemed wholly natural.  That is, he was the only actor in the production who already knew how to act. He looks inconceivably young and vulnerable, and while there is nothing very interesting about his character, you still care that he is probably (OK, definitely) going to die.

The third element that drew me in was the almost documentary-like patience and simplicity of the film.  Friday the 13th is not showy, not just because there’s no budget for pyrotechnics, but because the script is a simple story that will demand patience of the audience. There’s no hint here that the sequels will mutate into ever gorier and more over-the-top supernatural thrillers.

 All of the characters are ordinary.  No one is a superhero or a super-villain.  No one is, even, a hero or villain.  The young people who are reopening the camp are typical young people. They are neither particularly likeable (with the exception of Bacon) nor unlikeable (with the exception of prankish “Ned”). The activities that they engage in are typical activities. They paint.  They clean. They organize.  They swim.  They talk. They laugh. They cook supper.  They play music and games.  A young couple slips off to be alone together.  It’s all very human and ordinary, and the camera lingers over those ordinary moments as if they matter.  If it weren’t for the fact that every ten minutes or so someone gets murdered, this would be a rather ho-hum “How to reopen your summer camp” documentary!

But someone does get murdered every ten minutes or so, and in very grisly and variable ways (the common theme being that a blade is typically involved).  A knife for one victim, a hatchet for another, and so on.  And on.  The pull of the movie becomes the question “Will anyone survive?”

The answer (SPOILERS ahead) is that, yes, there will be one lone survivor.  One of the young women survives until the end.  She is not the most attractive or intelligent or wise or likeable of the cast, but that seems to be rather the point.  What she lacks in other aspects is balanced by her tenacity.  In what becomes an almost agonizingly drawn-out final face-off, she confronts the murderer, then escapes, then confronts the murderer again, over and over, in a painful cycle.

Our heroine—though she isn’t, really—makes ludicrous and repeated mistakes.  She constantly gives away her hiding places by whimpering, shouting, wrenching drawers open and shut, knocking things over, turning on lights, turning off lights—you name it, and she does it, which is how the killer keeps finding her.  By all rights, our lone survivor should be as dead as the other victims.

 But this isn’t a film about justice or logic.  It’s a film about survival.  And sometimes the survivor is the one with the most cockroach-like qualities, an ability to be found and knocked down, and found and knocked down again, and so on and so forth, while continuing to refuse to just give in.  In this story the survivor’s tenacity saves her where intellect, cunning, etc.—qualities we tend to laud in such filmic situations—have gone by the board.

 Who is the killer, anyway?  For the one other person besides me who hasn’t seen the movie yet:  another SPOILER alert.  The villain is not the soon-to-be-famous-and-iconic-and-unkillable Jason Voohrees but, rather, Jason Voohrees’ off-the-rails mother.  Once she heard that the camp at Crystal Lake was going to be reopened, Pamela Voohrees dove off the deep end of sanity, into the abyss. She decided she simply had to kill those meddling kids who were disturbing the accursed land where her son drowned, years before, due to the inattention of his camp counselors.

 Film and TV veteran Betsy Palmer does a capable job chewing the scenery as wronged mama Voohrees, swinging blades and channeling the voice of her drowned son with gleeful intensity. Sporting an eminently sensible woodland sweater-and-slacks ensemble, Jason’s mother chases the lone survivor from cabin to cabin, building to building, room to room, wounding and being wounded, and refusing as steadfastly as her prey to surrender.

They fight, they draw blood, the girl slips away, and the psychotic mama Voohrees pursues. It happens again.  And again.  And again. At no point does the girl arm herself with a suitable weapon, although she stumbles through a wealth of them during the pursuits.  “Come on!” I found myself shouting at the screen, “Grab that kettle/pot/pan/knife/hatchet/etc.!”  Instead of which, she would grab nothing, or she would grab something woefully inadequate, like a cheap-looking brownie tray, and immediately discard it after using it only once.  The lone survivor in Friday the 13th is no Buffy the Vampire Slayer—she is a fumble-fingered stand-in for us, if the truth be told.  It’s tough to admit, but wouldn’t most of us be as clumsily terrified as this girl is if Pamela Voohrees were stalking us?

 The showdown goes on and on. I would like to think that the writers were making a point about the painful struggles of life, struggles that drag out, and cycle back, rearing their heads just when you think everything is going to be OK.  I would even like to think the writers were tapping into the female empowerment zeitgeist of the early 80’s, making both the bad guy and good guy of the movie women.  However … the endless final battle might merely have been due to too light of a hand in the editing bay.

 Well, allrighty then. Mama Voohrees is finally dispatched.  She was full-bore crazy, but she was mortal.  Lone survivor girl floats around the lake all night, huddled in a canoe, using the water as a protective zone between her and whatever other evils might be lurking in the accursed woods. The next morning she has a nightmare (or is it?) about a rotted and malformed boy, Jason himself, leaping up from the depths of the lake like a demented flying fish, attacking her, trying to drag her under.

 Smash cut to the hospital where she is recovering.  Minor-characters-only-there-for-exposition assure her the attack by Jason was only a dream.  She’s going to be fine. Riiiiight. One of the rules of this genre is that even if you physically survive such ordeals, emotionally, mentally and spiritually you are never fine again … Unless you are the film’s producers.  Then you are more than fine. You are running to the bank and diving into piles of money that only drift higher as sequel after sequel is released.

 If you haven’t seen Friday the 13th in a while, why not see it again? It’s a perfect “early summer” flick.  You can probably Netflix it.  Or adjust your rabbit ear antennae and find the old movie station on which I caught it. Pop some popcorn, make sure the kids are asleep (or at least out of the room—it’s an R-rated horror flick, for crying out loud!) and let Friday the 13th pull you in once again, like it did 34 years ago. And this summer, if you’re thinking about fixing up that old camp down the road, the one they used to call “Camp Blood,”or your mother-in-law’s old house, (or any other potentially accursed property)… let it go.

Summer is here.  It doesn't begin officially until June 21, but with June glooms burning away to long sunny days, and the kids out of school, summer has already started.  The question now is what to do with your summer.  One answer:  Explore your city.

Los Angeles is an ever-changing puzzle box of delights--many of them free.  Plan summer city excursions with your kids and family.  The possibilities are endlessly varied.  A simple walk down Broadway or Hill Street, for example, carries you past historic landmarks and architectural treasures.

A city excursion doesn't have to be complicated or expensive.  It can be as light and effervescent as sun on water, as well as a fun learning experience for you and your kids.  Break your adventures over multiple weekends.  Map your general route or destination in advance.  Don't forget the sunblock, hat, comfortable walking shoes/sneakers--and your curiosity.

Some suggestions to kick-start your adventures:

LA's Central Library - FREE - A historic landmark that offers art exhibits, architectural tours, story time and free lunches for kids--and, oh, yeah:  books.

LA's City Hall - FREE - A portrait gallery of LA's past mayors, and an observation deck offering 360 degrees of stunning views of your city.

LA Times - FREE Tours - LA's venerable flagship newspaper offers free tours--check the website for details.

The Last Bookstore - FREE to browse - Bargain books and vinyl records, concerts, book signings, art exhibits, poetry readings and oh-so-much-more.  One of the hipster cultural hearts of renaissance LA.

Grand Central Market - FREE to browse - Classic produce stands and mom-n-pop stalls interspersed with hip new restaurants.  A long-time LA landmark not-to-be-missed.

Grand Park - FREE - Throw a frisbee, catch a concert or late-night outdoor movie, grab a bite at a food truck, meditate, read a book, or take a stroll.  One of LA's newest green spaces, where your tots are allowed to run through the fountain.

Bradbury Building - FREE ground level - One of LA's most iconic and dreamlike structures, used frequently in films and TV shows.  Check the Bradbury Building website for information about free tours on the ground-floor level.

Million Dollar Theatre - $10 - One of LA's first theatres, the beautiful and partially refurbished space has begun showing classic films in partnership with "Vintage LA".

St. Vincent's Court - FREE to browse - This Jewelry District gem is tucked away--you have to make an effort to find it.  Nosh deli treats while soaking in the old-world European atmosphere.

Olvera Street - FREE to browse - Wander one of LA's oldest thoroughfares, perusing the imported fabrics, toys and bags, eating delicious Mexican food, exploring one of LA's oldest adobe residences, and visiting the Church of Our Lady Queen of the Angels.

Chinatown - FREE to browse - Everything from bargain T shirts and sunglasses to live poultry, delicious Chinese cuisine, and lovely Chinese architecture and history.  Take the time to chat with the shop owners, some of whom have been in Chinatown for many decades.

Little Tokyo - FREE to browse - Japanese food and imports, a large Japanese supermarket, the Japanese American Cultural Center--and a ukelele store!

Summer is here--where will it lead you?

Leslie is the author of Downtown Los Angeles in Photographs 2013 and Downtown Los Angeles in Photographs 2014--Broadway, available at Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.
  

Just as World War II was winding down, my father's father died.  Dad was 16 or 17.  His father was his hero, and Dad took the death hard.  He talked his mother into signing a parental consent form so that he could join the army.  Dad was 17 then.  Before his mother quite understood, I'm sure, what had happened, her youngest son was an Army PFC shipping out to US-occupied Japan.  The army would become his father.

Dad loved Japan.  The architecture, the culture, the people.  When he had time to himself he explored Tokoy and its environs.  And, being an intelligent and good-looking kid, he managed to arrange some pleasant duties among the grind of life as a PFC in an occupied foreign nation.  He joined a USO troop and toured the country playing a small role in the play "Brother Rat".  He had fine manners and knew how to dance and wear a tuxedo properly, so he was tapped to serve as the date to some function or other with the Swedish Ambassador's daughter.

Dad was in and out of the army in his twenties.  He would serve his hitches in the army, and greatly enjoyed them, even when he had KP duty.  Back in the civilian world, he appears to have supported himself at times as a musician in New York City.  He was a New Yorker, born and bred, and a magnificent pianist.  When he was twelve years old his parents bought him a baby grand and music lessions, but he was largely self-taught and though he could read music, he played mostly by ear.  Throughout his twenties he played piano in NYC and took college courses and somewhere along the line he met and befriended some of the young Beats.  But he always ended up re-upping for another hitch in the army, and then another.  The army drew him.  It gave him structure and brotherhood and seemed to serve as a parent in absentia of his deceased father.

In the army, he was always on the move.  He served in Korea during the Korean war.  He was posted to most of the continental United States at one point or another.  He studied French at the army's language academy in Monterey, CA, and then was posted to France and Germany in the mid-to-late 1950's.  He had training duties and clerical duties and paymaster duties.  Wherever he was posted, he explored the place, the people and the architecture and the culture.  In France in the early 1960's, he was instrumental in organizing the great Aerospace exposition.

Somewhere along the line he began writing for the army's newspapers and magazines.  By the mid 1960's he was a sergeant posted to the Pentagon and writing speeches for a colonel.  He met my mother in Washington, DC.  She was the niece of a Navy Commander (my great-great aunt) who was friends with his widowed mother.  Dad and mom "met cute" as I always say; Dad arrived for dinner with his mother and the Navy Commander just as my mother was leaving for a date with an Annapolis boy.  Army won.  Dad and Mom married in 1966.

In 1967 I was born, and a few weeks later Dad went to Vietnam.  He served as an army reporter and editor, often near or at the front lines.  Not long after he returned, he was promoted to Sergeant-Major, the highest non-com rank in the army, and not long after that, we--Dad, Mom, my baby brother and I--flew to Darmstadt, Germany where Dad was editor and reporter for the army's "Stars and Stripes Magazine" until 1972.

My brother and I remember Germany as our childhood home, because that was where we were toddlers, and where our earliest memories were formed.  That was also where our baby sister was born.  In 1972, Dad finally left the army.  When that hitch ended, he retired, and we all flew back to Massachusetts, settling in a beautiful little rural village within a half-hour's drive of Mom's parents.

Dad took up a series of jobs and projects then.  He always worked hard and made sure we had a nice roof over our head, and food on the table.  He worked in retail, as a security guard, as a debt collector, as a substitute teacher, as a reporter for the local paper--so many different jobs, but always gainful employment.  He played piano at restaurants sometimes, too, to make ends meet for his wife and three children.  He completed his undergraduate degree, too, and he went on to earn his law degree.

But whatever he did, nothing was ever like being in the army.  Being a soldier had been his career, his vocation, in a way that nothing in civilian life could be.  In the early 1980's he returned to active duty for just one year, working at the Pentagon to assist with a retiree program championed by then-President Ronald Reagan.  Dad's year at the Pentagon meant lean times and belt-tightening for Mom and us kids up in Massachusetts.  Mom returned to work at the phone company to help make ends meet and keep that roof over our head and food on our table.  She had been working at the phone company when Dad met her in DC. 

After that final one-year assignment, Dad never returned to active duty.  He retained his love for the army, however, until his passing in 2011.  He subscribed to Army Digest.  He marched in every Memorial Day and Veterans' Day parade.  He kept his uniforms in good order, and was proud to be able to fit into them when he marched in the parades.  Of all the jobs he ever had, and all the degrees he earned, that is how I think he will be remembered most--as a patriot, as a soldier, and, yes, as a musician.  Service to his country, and music, were his true callings.

 On Memorial Days we miss him keenly.  He hasn't been gone quite three years yet.  It still doesn't quite register that he won't be dusting off his uniform, and walking in the parade.  We three children all live in California.  Mom and Dad, having retired to Maine, would send us photos every summer--Dad in his uniform, Dad marching in the parade.  Mom took a photo of him in his uniform that last Memorial Day, in May 2011, but he wasn't strong enough to walk in the parade.  They sent us the photo, not mentioning that he hadn't marched; they didn't want to worry us.  By November, he would be gone.

 His father had served in the military, and my mother's father and uncle, and mother's great aunt, and later my brother would serve.  We've always been patriotic on both sides of the family.  On this day, I thank and honor all men and women, family and friends and strangers, who follow that calling to serve our country, in war and in peace.  They make our dreams possible.  They make our freedom possible.  God bless them, and God bless my father, on this Memorial Day.  I can still hear Dad playing the see him marching in his uniform.

LJL, May 26, 2014  


    

In celebration of  National Record Store Day on April 19, 2014, I'm blogging my never-published  "LA City Guide" piece about the beauties of vinyl and the shops that sell it. 

If you grew up spinning Floyd and Zepp way too loud on turntables in the basement, you understand the near-mystic allure of  listening to music on vinyl.  The warmsizzle-pop-hiss of an LP isn’t a flaw– it’s a strand of music.

Angelenos and tourists who miss the hiss can rediscover the natural beauty of records at one of the music shops – mostly mom-n-pop, pocket-sized caves – where L.A.’s vinyl renaissance thrives.  The city that launched bands as diverse as the Doors, the Beach Boys, N.W.A., the Go-Gos, the Byrds, Black Flag, Metallica, Tierra, and the Runaways is, not surprisingly, a center of old, new, and rare vinyl.

You don’t have to be a hipster-of-a-certain-age to understand vinyl’s appeal. 
Digital technology paints every overproduced note with unsettlingly perfect clarity, so music lovers of all ages turn to vinyl for a toothy sound  that feels deeper and more real.  For oldsters it might be nostalgia.  For the D.I.Y. generation, the sizzle of vinyl feeds a craving for authenticity.

Art lovers worship vinyl’s eye-popping cover art (which is never as seductive when shrunk to fit CD sleeves or clickable “download” icons).  Album covers
make an ideal canvas across which images flow in a swoon-worthy melt of color.  There is something primal in eyeballing a great piece of cover art, picking up the album, and turning it over in your hands.  Holding an album is the musical equivalent of the hunter’s “proof of kill”.

Amoeba Music is the King Kong of L.A. music shops, boasting an encyclopedic selection, expert staff, and frequent concerts.  Amoeba came early to the
vinyl renaissance.  It launched in Berkeley in 1990, opening the Hollywood store a few blocks from the iconic Capitol Records building in 2001.  Scoping records at Amoeba on Sunset is like digging through the exhaustive vinyl collection in your cool friend’s basement pad, if he had a really big basement, say, the size of an underground NORAD hangar. In a contemporary twist, Amoeba is now digitizing a curated vinyl collection in their Vinyl Vaults.

At the other extreme, small record shops are quirky labors of love launched by owners who share the magic of vinyl with their neighbors in historic districts that have tumbled into decay – hello, reasonable rents! – but are trying to rise from the ashes.  Local culture – art, eats, and vinyl – often play a big part in steering a depressed neighborhood back from the brink.  These little shops can feel held together by twine, tape, and wishful thinking – but deep music passion and knowledge are there.

Small music shops excel at handcrafted touches like the silver labels affixed to many records at Mount Analog, album descriptions ranging from the workmanlike to the poetic (consider “bubbling funk,” or comparing an album’s sound to time spent “in Laurel Canyon”).  Mid-size shops have their charms and treasures too, like the bargain bins at the Last Bookstore, where a discerning customer can purchase the “Carousel” LP (cover graced by an impossibly young Shirley Jones) for 99 cents.
 
Four fabulous vinyl destinations for music lovers in L.A.:
 
1. Everything and the Kitchen Sink

 Amoeba
Music –
6400 W. Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA  90028
 (323) 245-6400  |  www.amoeba.com 
  Hours:  10:30 am – 11:00 pm Mon – Sat, 11:00 am – 9:00 pm Sun

 CDs, DVDs, and armadas of vinyl.  Buy, trade, sell.  Concerts and events. Vast selection.

 
2. Shoot from the Hipster

 The
Last Bookstore
–
453 S. Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA  90013
(213) 488-0599  |  http://lastbookstorela.com 
Hours:  10 am – 10 pm Mon – Thu, 10 am – 11 pm Fri – Sat, 9 am – 9 pm Sun

 Used books and vinyl.  Art galleries.  Events. Quirky, artsy, gritty downtown hipster-haven.

 
3. On the Dark Side

 Mount
Analog –
5906 ½ Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA  90042
 (323) 474-6649  |  www.climbmountanalog.com
 Hours:  12 pm – 8 pm Tue – Sat, 12 pm – 6 pm Sun, Closed Mon

 New, indie, and rare vinyl.  Dark and edgy, with occult wares like Tarot cards.

 
4. Cheers!

 Wombleton
Records –
5123 York Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA  90042
 (213) 422-0069  |  www.wombletonrecords.com
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You wouldn’t know it now, but for millennia Las Vegas was a swamp.  Over thousands of years it declined into a desert—a desert that entombs fossils by the thousands, remains of prehistoric creatures that roamed the ancient swamp.  

Even in its dessert state, the region contains underground water.  That means springs.  And wells.  Over the years, these subterranean waters have refreshed Native American tribes like the Paiute, Mexican explorers (“Las Vegas” is Spanish for “the meadows”), pioneers, Mormon settlers, and miners.
 
By the early 1900’s, brothels and gambling establishments blossomed in Las Vegas, creating what critics would label a moral “swamp” in the clear desert air.  The red light houses and gaming joints catered first to miners, and later
to the workers laboring heroically to build the Hoover Dam.
 
Once the dam was completed in the mid-1930’s, the workers moved on.  But the military was moving in, using the desert for training and testing.  The establishments of questionable repute that had welcomed the Hoover Dam workers were just as happy to embrace the military personnel.  It was at this time that electricity generated by the brand new dam touched Las Vegas with fire—electric fire—the incandescence that first gave Las Vegas its glow and gleam, and its nickname of “Glitter Gulch”.
 
Notwithstanding its electric brilliance, Las Vegas was decried by some as anything but a shining beacon of civilization.  Attempts to clean up “sin city” are old hat.  But its momentum could not be stopped, particularly as local politicians often had stakes in and wholeheartedly supported the establishments under fire by the moral coalitions.
 
In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, the post-war boom brought two things to Las Vegas:  Ambitious mobsters like Bugsy Siegel (who built the Flamingo), and legions of tourists with leisure time and money to burn.  It was a potent combination of mobsters who wanted to take suckers’ money, and willing marks who wanted to spend it, a magical cocktail that set the foundation for Las Vegas as we know it today.
 
The mob—as well as more reputable casino owners—built glitzy and comfortable surroundings for their marks, providing buffets so hearty and so inexpensive that they became legendary, and the best in entertainment.  Elvis. 
Sinatra.  Sammy Davis Jr.  Heart-stopping showgirls sporting elaborate feathered-and-sequined headdresses that weighed more than the showgirls did.  The décor was bright and glittery and colorful and gaudy in a way that the mob and the typical wide-eyed American tourist read as “glamorous”.  The modern Las Vegas was born.
 
In the days before the dangers of nuclear testing were understood, detonations were part of Las Vegas entertainment.  You savored cocktails while you and your friends watched a not-so-distant mushroom cloud fill the desert sky, then descend to ground level for steaks and martinis, roulette and a show.
 
During the ensuing decades, the casinos expanded like mushroom clouds, not only in number, but in size and spectacle.  Classic casinos were exploded, imploded, and bulldozed.  Massive gambling-and-entertainment palaces rose on their bones.  Gambling remained a staple, as well as red light activities, but the morals crowd finally achieved victories in pushing out much of the mob; corporate businessmen and investors largely replaced the gangsters who had put Glitter Gulch on the map.
 
Las Vegas today can be—and has been—described as a Disneyland for grown-ups, a place of leisure packed with iconic symbols reminiscent of our childhood dreams.  Casino resorts embody our fantasies.  A pyramid.   A castle.  Italianate palaces.  A compact and idealized New York City.  A compact and idealized Paris.
 
Navigating the casinos of Las Vegas is to navigate a dream, or, rather, a jumble of dreams piled upon dreams.  At Caesar’s Palace, towering marble statues mimic treasures of one of the cradles of civilization.  At the Bellagio, towering columns of water dance in carefully choreographed movements in the fountain out front, while inside rivers of chocolate flow down a twenty-seven foot tall fountain.  Circus Circus presents trapeze and acrobatic acts to dazzle the casual stroller. Treasure Island presents a rousing pirate show.  Paris Casino invites you to the top of an elegant replica of the Eiffel Tower.
 
It would take an entire book to unpack the imagery of today’s Glitter Gulch.  Suffice it to say that in every possible way, Las Vegas draws visitors into a dream world where they begin to feel as exotic and interesting and rich as their surroundings, a state in which they are quite likely and quite willing to part with their money.
 
Marks are feted grandly, enforcing the illusion that every visitor, whether a housewife or painter or banker or subway token collector, is a VIP.  Those legendary, nearly free buffets are a thing of the past, but even standard hotel rooms show splashes of elegance, and rates are kept reasonable to invite longer stays.  Shows remain big, featuringgenuine superstars like Celine Dion as well as once-superstar talents like magician David Copperfield and brother-and-sister crooners Donny and Marie.  Casinos are beautifully decorated, from the lobbies to the pools to the gaming floors, where thousands of gaming tables and slot machines invite visitors to lose their money in big handfuls at the blackjack and craps tables, or penny-by-penny at the slots.
 
Penny machines are plentiful in every casino.  And, as canny casino runners know, it’s surprisingly easy for marks to lose tens, even hundreds of dollars in the humble penny snatchers.  Fitted with elaborate interactive visuals, cheerful music, and sound effects that mimic the shimmer of a magic wand or the seductive clinking of coins, penny machines use small, short-term payoffs to entice marks to feed more and more money into them until, suddenly, there is no money left to feed.
 
Lulled by the plush and glittering surroundings, by a fine prime rib dinner, by a series of brews or colorful cocktails, everyone begins to feel like a player.  Every sense is engaged—even scent; enter New York, New York Casino, for example, and you are embraced by the scent of fresh apples which infuses the casino.  The apple scent is a reference to New York’s nickname “The Big Apple”.  Appropriately enough, the apple is also a classic symbol of temptation, and seduction.
 
In the perfumed, fantastic world of the Las Vegas casinos and resorts, nothing seems quite real—including money.  And so the money flows, in the millions of millions, generally from the visitors to the casinos’ coffers.
 
If you visit Las Vegas and feel in need of a bracing jolt to restrain your gambling, venture north of “the strip” and the casino district.
 
To the north you will find dingy little strip malls, and abandoned bungalows that might once have housed brothels, and jigsaw piles of rubble that were once glittering palaces of fun.
 
To the north you will find smaller, older casinos on their last legs, their dazzle now dimmed and nearly extinct, stranded like islands, last gasps of prosperity in the midst of ruin and decay.  The landscape is flat and grey and beige and washed-out and tinted with a spent desperation.
 
To the north you will find some of the city’s homeless shambling along cracked sidewalks, toothlessly mumbling and brushing strands of lank hair from their sunburned brows.  You will wonder if some of the homeless arrived with fat bankrolls that were lost at the gaming tables, on unlucky turns of the roulette wheel.
 
Las Vegas today has such glimpses of beauty, genuine beauty, from gourmet meals to works of art like the blossom ceiling in the Bellagio’s lobby.  And the Vegas shows, the spectacle, the gambling—even at its gaudiest, Las Vegas is a great deal of fun.
 
But it is a delight to be enjoyed cautiously, and for a brief time only.  Robert Frost wrote that“nothing gold can stay”.  And it can’t.  Not the glimmer of today’s casinos, which will someday be piles of rubble to be carted  away.  Not the success of the performers now shining on Vegas stages.  Ask the fossilized mammoths extracted from Las Vegas soil.  They, and the Mexican explorers, and the Mormons, and the mobsters (mostly) are merely memories now.
 
Nothing gold can stay, even in Las Vegas.  Perhaps especially in effervescent Las Vegas, which has always been a  place of reinvention. Nothing gold
can stay long in Glitter Gulch—and that includes your bankroll.


 

Immersive theme parks—Disneyland being the gold standard—invite visitors into a three-dimensional dream.  For each visitor the dream is unique, a collaboration between the dream-like environment which they have entered, and their own imagination.  No one’s experience (dream) of  Disneyland is the same as another person’s.  Not precisely.

Designer Justin Jorgensen and friends launched Dapper Days as a dream-within-a-dream—or a dream-electroplating-a-dream.  Harking back to the not-so-long-ago convention of dressing up for a day out (even at a theme park), Dapper Days are organized opportunities for Disneyland visitors to wear their very best.
 
Dapper Days have grown in scope and popularity every year.  Held twice annually, in spring and autumn, the events now include discounted rates at resort hotels like Disneyland’s Grand Californian, lectures on fashion, books on style and etiquette, and pop-up shops where the discerning stylisto or stylista can purchase vintage dresses, suits, hats, eyeglasses, ties, suspenders, and costume jewelry.
 
The primary point of Dapper Days is for visitors to be fashionable and well-groomed, a goal primarily met by wearing vintage threads, accessories, and hairstyles.  One can wear stylish contemporary clothes, but most participants skew vintage, sporting fashions of 1910 – 1960.
 
Dapper Days are a heady experience.  In a space where oversized mice wear costumes and are beloved by millions, where one of the world’s largest train sets circles the park, where pirates still sack the Spanish Main, where a pixie soars eighty feet over a fairy tale castle, and where an elephant really flies, in the midst of a land already given over to fantasy and imagination, the influx of thousands of elegantly turned out visitors in period clothing introduces yet another level of the fantastic.
 
A young woman in a cloche hat and flowing Depression-era skirt evokes an image of early Nancy Drew.  A man in top hat and vest strolls arm-in-arm with a woman twirling a parasol.  A soldier in dress uniform is accompanied by a woman sporting red lipstick, a 1940’s pompadour, and 1940’s dress and heels.
 
There are older participants, but most are young, aged between twenty and thirty-five approximately, clear evidence, should any be required, of the younger generation’s fascination with history.  There are solitary dappers, but most navigate the resort in pairs or packs.
 
They move as graciously as they have dressed, queuing politely in a monstrously long line to ride a riverboat by the hundreds.  Once aboard, they stand at the rails of the riverboat, waving in a genteel, smiling manner to the visitors below as the riverboat glides along the shore.  It is a grand dream image:  Stylish young people of every era of the 1900’s, standing at the rails of
a majestic riverboat.
 
Justin Jorgensen and his colleagues are to be praised for introducing another layer of hallucinatory beauty to spaces already rich with fantasy and symbol.  In such ways do designers, dreamers, and visionaries enrich the simulacra in which we increasingly exist.
 
If you missed Disneyland’s spring Dapper Day, mark your calendars for September 12, 2014.  This is an event you must experience personally, your perceptions combining with the whimsical images to create a world of imagination that is all your own.  (www.dapperday.com)


 

It always confounds me when pundits worry about the younger generations, about the Millennials (b. circa 1980 – 1999) and the Digitals (b. 2000 – present).  All I can picture when those pundits wax gloomy is Mr. Wilson shaking his fist at “Dennis the Menace”.  Whenever this happened, Mr. Wilson’s wife, Martha, promptly dosed her husband with a spoonful of his “nerve medicine” and told him to go lie down. Then Martha said something nice to Dennis, and gave him a plateful of cookies.  See, Martha got it.  Dennis, however irritating, was part of a dynamically disruptive new generation that was going to change the world.  He didn’t mean to turn everything upside down.  But it was his destiny, and his generation’s.


 So, the Millennials and Digitals are less … aggressive than the Boomers were.  They aren’t as strident or as chipper as they Boomers were—but they are more stylish.  The Millennials and Digitals are going to change the world—are already changing it—in a quietly disruptive way.  A politely disruptive way that will ultimately be constructive. Because one of the many things to admire about the younger generations is that they are creators, as well as consumers.  They create as well as consume culture, entertainment, design, goods, and technology.  And they not only create—they share what they create.  With everyone, and anyone.  Often for free.  They create for the sake of the act of creation, not to become billionaires (although that does, sometimes, happen along the way).

 
For this new youth, the act of creation is more important than the perfection of that which is created. The artifacts produced and widely shared by the Millennials and Digitals often have an appealingly hand-crafted, heartfelt, “let’s put on a show in the barn” quality.  Everything from music to art to video to gadgetry to throw pillows should have a texture—a smudge here, a stray thread showing there.  Artifacts that glow with shiny-bright perfection are either dismissed by the M’s and D’s as too finished, or consumed by the M’s and D’s as an act of conscious irony.

 
What I admire most about the M’s and D’s is their appreciation for the past.  Not merely the recent past, but distant (by the American reckoning of time, anyway) history.  Shawl collars are back—for men—as are pork pie hats and big dark-framed eyeglasses.  And while young men today appear to have stepped out of time machines installed in the 1920’s, 30’s, or 40’s, young women echo the sartorial time warp in their vintage Depression-era dresses and chunky shoes, or their seventies Boho silhouettes.  These retro-clad young hipsters are moving into affordably shabby gentrified lofts and houses, and downloading onto their“i”-everythings selections of digitized vinyl classics that could have been heard wafting from open windows on Tin Pan Alley or Don Draper’s apartment.

 
Which is not to say that today’s young people are not forward-looking.  While the M’s and D’s are visiting, even basking in, the past, they are creating the future, which promises to be an increasingly diverse, creative, and communal world, if its designers and future inhabitants are any indication. But our youth has no problem shifting amorphously from the present to the future to the past, and back again, endlessly, and effortlessly.

 
It’s no accident that many of the programs, films, and video games most popular with this demographic feature supernatural creatures—often stylish reboots of very old classics (see “Grimm” or “Dracula” or “I, Frankenstein” or the “Mass Effect” games). These supernatural beings are typically diverse (racially, ethnically, socioeconomically), but they are always beautiful, frequently ancient, sometimes immortal.

 
An important quality is their connectedness.  Whether they are trying to save the world, or trying to destroy it, they are all up in each other’s business.  Among these highly social, communal creatures, one person’s problem or secret or drama ends up impacting everyone else, usually in unexpected ways.  Therefore, one person’s problem or secret or drama belongs to everyone.

 
It is this connectedness that makes it clear that these supernatural beings are avatars for the M’s and D’s (the generations who are  linked to each other, almost every moment of every day, via text messages, social media sites, multiplayer online games, and share-sites YouTube and Instagram and Vine).  The fictional, supernatural heroes and villains portray how Millennials and Digitals see themselves, or want to see themselves.  The fictional worlds the M and D’s avatars inhabit are aspirational as much as they are reflective.  M’s and D’s have identified with supernatural characters, banded together in diverse, close-knit, purposeful tribes, since the first episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (arguably the prototype for this sort of ensemble) enthralled teen Millennials in the mid-1990’s.

 
View any 2014 episode of “Dracula” or “Sleepy Hollow” or“The Originals” or “Reign” (or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” for that matter) and we see tightly linked groups of beautiful young people who are heroic and witty and talented and tolerant and flawed—yes, even “the bad guys”. Their lives are deeply entwined.  They all have purpose.  And they seem to slip effortlessly between different historical periods, through time and space, fantasy and reality, just as modern technology has allowed the M’s and D’s to shuttle along non-linear paths between the real and the virtual, to experience history, to listen to music and wear clothing from eras that seemed “old” even to their grandparents.



“Wired” (the February 2014 issue) and Chuck Klosterman (in“Eating the Dinosaur”) remark upon the way the past, present, and future are collapsing.  These kids today—they can (and do) listen to Frank Sinatra, watch painstakingly restored footage of early 20th-century battles and historical events on an electronic device that they can hold in their hands, wear the aforementioned shawl collars (un-ironically), and stream episodes of "Supernatural” or read a digitized copy of Bram Stoker’s original “Dracula” at the tap of an icon.

 
Because the past is deeply, instantly present for today’s young people, one thing you will find them doing in droves is revitalizing lovely old buildings—entire neighborhoods, even—that have fallen on hard times.  Today’s youth sign petitions to save these places, and rent or buy property at these locations, and attend meetings and rallies and fundraisers to resurrect the past in all its glory.

 
They apply their DIY creativity to open bars and cafés and restaurants and stores in these “undead” neighborhoods, in a conscious effort to revitalize them, to galvanize them back to life.  The M’s and D’s who cannot afford to open bars or restaurants or stores patronize them. The simple acts of drinking, eating, and shopping therefore become meaningful because those acts, in those locations, support a greater cause, fostering a building (or neighborhood, or city-wide) renaissance.

 
Wherever they live, drink, eat, or shop, the M’s and D’s are recording their experiences in words and images, and sharing the experiences via the worldwide electronic membrane, a medium that is increasingly become a quasi-real “place” populated by the people we wish we were (and kind of are) and the surgically extracted moments of our lives that we not only want to preserve but want to communicate to others. Nearly everything has become communal. Our image, and bits and pieces of our lives, once uploaded, become omnipresent and eternal and the de facto property of all.

 
The tendency of the M’s and D’s to commune and communicate is outstanding for historical preservationists, particularly in Downtown Los Angeles, where legions of hipster Millennials and Digitals have moved in and are reclaiming the once-blighted landscape. They are not tearing down old properties in a mad rush to build the new.  Rather, they are thoughtfully, appreciatively resurrecting the long-neglected beauty that was already there under layers of peeling paint, crumbling drywall, and icing-thick graffiti.

 
Our young citizens don fedoras, checked jackets, vintage dresses and boots, and attend preservation events.  Such gatherings are often held at “new” venues that conscientiously revive bygone worlds:  vinyl record shops, classic diners, gloriously restored golden-age movie palaces.  And, of course, the M’s and D’s record and then share their impressions of these events, the sounds and words and images, spreading the message, raising the profile of the cause, driving up interest.

 
When is the last time a vast population of young people was so entranced by what came before them?  One glaring example:  Millennials and Digitals wear three-piece suits and top hats and flapper gowns to Disneyland on“Dapper Days”.  If you have attended one of these stylish events, you know that almost without exception Dapper Day attendees, with their parasols and suspenders and pocket watches and canes, range in age from fifteen to thirty-five. These are the youths who watch the ubiquitously popular ghost-hunting programs more for the historical content than for the ghosts.  This genuine reverence for the past is a generational hallmark not seen, perhaps, among our youth, since before the Great War.

 
There are, of course, posers among the M’s and D’s, as there are in any group.  There are young men and young women who dress like hipsters and listen to Doris Day and Tweet about“Supernatural” merely to be part of their generation, merely to ensure that their selfies and their social media pages are in line with their peers’.  However, posers seem to be a small subculture.  And the M’s and D’s, being particularly earnest and self-policing generations, have a nose for sniffing out the most egregious and obnoxious poseurs in their midst and dealing with them in the global stocks of the worldwide web.

 
I admire the Millennials and Digitals immensely, nearly everything about them.  The Mr. Wilsons of the world need to take their nerve medicine and go lie down.  Let the M’s and D’s go about their creative, non-linear travel among time and space as they construct our brave new worlds.

 
Yet … I can’t suppress a slight feeling of unease whenever I see advertisements for uber-popular cable program “The Walking Dead”.  Because when I see the rotting zombies scurrying after the pretty young cast, I can’t quite shake the feeling that the fleet-footed zombie slayers reflect the M’s and D’s, whereas the zombies shambling after them in a disorganized, uncoordinated ballet … that’s my generation.



I don’t know—yet—exactly what that means, but the zombies are GenX, infected with … what?  With some defect that the M’s and D’s escaped, most likely—and quite paradoxically—because GenXers have been such excellent parents?  If so, it isn’t right … and it isn’t fair … but, somehow, the zombie is me.