Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles’

Marina Del Ray

Saturday, May 16th, 2009

For the last two weeks, I’ve been in Los Angeles. Actually Santa Monica. Actually Marina Del Ray. A gang of us from SITI Company have been making a new show. It is a new version of Antigone, written by Jocelyn Clarke. We’re working at the Getty Villa which is just up the coast from where we’re living. Where we’re living is two blocks from Venice Beach.

I’m spent quite a bit of time in Los Angeles over the years, and have come out to this area just to visit the beach, but I’ve never spent this much time here. Although we’ve been so busy with the show I haven’t had that much time to myself, I’ve taken a few walks around and done a bit of running. It strikes me that the climate, fauna and even the architecture of this area is remarkably similar to areas of Japan that are very familiar to me from childhood. This is a bit weird. I mean, this is Venice Beach. We’re talking Muscle-Beach and paddle-tennis and literal beach bums waking up under huge swaths of graffiti. Sand in everything. Despite the clear differences between almost any part of Japan and California beach culture, I have moments when a smell wafts through the air here that transports me back to my childhood in a powerful way.

It’s not just the ocean. Even though it is the Pacific one.

I think a lot of this is botanical.

I think a lot of this is neurological.

Powerful nostalgia in places we’ve never been…

I fly to Shanghai in the wee hours of Monday morning. Never been there. Wonder if I’ll remember it…

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Dog silencer

Sunday, August 10th, 2008

Had a pretty decent bowl of Gumbo Ya Ya at “The Gumbo Pot” in the Farmer’s market by “The Grove” here in L.A. today. Also had an order of Hush Puppies.

For those of you who don’t know, a “Hush Puppy” is a smallish morsel of corn bread, fried in some kind of fat. The name comes from the story that cooks would make these to throw to the dogs to shut them up when they were barking. Don’t know if it’s true but it’s as good a story as any.

I was thinking about the fact that I, like a lot of Northerners, first heard the words “Hush” and “Puppy” put together as the brand name of a loafer. It turns out that the name of the shoe comes from a sales manager for a shoe company on a trip to the southeast, hearing the story about the origins of the corn bread nuggets and naming the shoes after them. At the time (late 50′s) it was common to call tired feet “Barking dogs.” so a shoe that would sooth them was a…

This morning I was reading an article about how words like “Kamikaze” and “Hara-Kiri” are actually not Japanese words at all. Rather they are misreadings of the kanji for “Shimpu” and “Seppuku.” These words were essentially invented by anglophone translators (in some cases Nissei) during WWII, who simply didn’t know the pronunciation of the original Japanese words (this is a very understandable error if you know how the Japanese language works). Nevertheless, Kamikaze and Hara-kiri are now part of the Japanese lexicon through adoption.

So, while I ate my gumbo and corn bread, I was imagining an irresponsible etymologist coming to the conclusion that their shoe brand was suggesting that they should quiet a noisy dog by kicking it.

Ah, life.

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