Stories

Cinespia screenings on the side of the mausoleum at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery have been staples of Los Angeles summertime since their first screening in 2000. Still, I was too afraid to attend until last summer. I thought watching icon filled movies amidst the sleeping corpses of the icons themselves would be too tempting to their ghosts. Would not an actor or director or musician—narcissistic by trade—want to take a final curtain call? Wouldn’t the music of applause be enough to wretch their resting spirits from eternal slumber? So I left the screenings to burgeoning hipsters and longtime cinephiles and chose to rent classic movies at Vidiots instead.

I now love the screenings, so last Saturday when my friends asked me to join them at the cemetery to watch Elia Kazan's Cain and Abel classic East of Eden starring the James Dean, I said yes. However, like the great films themselves, going to the Hollywood Forever screenings is quite a production. 

Vintage tales of hardship and survival:
Grandad crushed when the tractor toppled
On Brier Hill. How Uncle John lost his arm
To the picker. Samuel smothered
In the silo, lungs full of harvest.

Thus reads a stanza of the poem Farming – One of the most dangerous occupations. It is representative of the twenty-six poems in Dead Horses, poems of struggle and suffering, loss and death. These are poems of memories, especially memories of horses:

Now that they are dead or gone, the dream
Is always of a field where horses
Flash past, hooves catching and echoing light,
The grass lush, milkweed or Queen Anne’s lace
Along the fencerows. Then suddenly it’s winter,
Snow is falling, shapes are haloed, the sky is bleak.

And another stanza, from the same poem:

…..You want them now, those horses
Crashing the earth with sound as if light
Had been surpassed by speed, as if the laces
That bind you to your bones gave way to winter’s
Blast…..

I was particularly popular last week. It began with the arrival of our pin up boy president, Barack Obama, just blocks from my house. Since local streets were closed to prevent us local aliens from crashing the political party, and no one was going anywhere, I decided to throw a blocked by Barack block party in my front yard, to celebrate our proximity to all the action at the Beverly Hilton. I fired up the gas grill and texted the next door neighbors whose kids sent tweets to others to bring sweets and treats, and we all e’d others and within an hour we drew a crowd. Folks “came as they were” with whatever was in their refrigerators “as it was.” I have no idea what the expiration dates were on most of the U.F.O’s (unidentified frying objects) on my barbecue, but I sauced, smoked and fed about fifteen denizens of my block who flocked with sniffly progeny to my yard for a gangland eating orgy. Partay!

New York, sometimes you just step in it.

My shopping and Jill’s are very different animals – she buys cute little things for other people, whereas I buy food for myself. Well, other people will get some of it, too. I don’t eat alone. And grocery shopping in the Village – if you know where to go – is one of the great joys of living in New York City. All the stores I have in mind exist in time warps – as if they haven’t changed a bit since the early 1900’s – which is exactly the truth.

They are — each store – of Italian origin, family-owned-and-operated and scrupulously dedicated to a kind of hands-on, personal involvement in each transaction. They have pride in what they sell. We quickly dispensed with Jill’s shopping list – a gift certificate for a special restaurant, a scarf for me(!), some tchochkes (that’s Jewish for cheap, little crappy things) for drop-in gifts, the best of which is something called, “Uh Oh” — it’s a little box with a pair of emergency underpants inside — and then we set off for my shopping spree – first to Bleecker Street for a double espresso at the fabled Porto Rico Coffee Company store. Just step through the door and you shed a hundred years. A double espresso is crucial when one sets out on a shopping trip. It gives one focus, energy and a skittery sense of optimism. I also picked up a pound of their Cent’anni espresso beans for home consumption.