Back from a fabulous week in L.A. The Geffen, which is part of MOCA, is at the edge of downtown adjacent to Little Toyko; it's terrific. Stop in if you're out there. Return visit to the cactus gardens at the Huntington. Unbelievably good Mexican dinner at a first-rate but little-known place in Silver Lake. Very good hotel 1 block from the beach in Santa Monica. Birthday dinner at 1 Pico (part of the Shutters Hotel). Hip French bistro in Venice (Lily's) where my son took no risk on ordering the beef tartare. The newish Frenk Gehry music hall, downtown, is stunning to see (and be in). An afternoon at the Getty Villa (the Aztec exhibit) with the Perloffs. Toured UCLA, too, which looked better than ever, despite its crumbling base of support and ballooning class sizes. We left and just a few hours letter a 7.1 quake hit. Weather, timing, everything: perfect. At right here is the famed proportionate L.A. Municipal Building reflected in the windows of an awful quick-rise police building across the street.
Monday, April 05, 2010
angels' city
Back from a fabulous week in L.A. The Geffen, which is part of MOCA, is at the edge of downtown adjacent to Little Toyko; it's terrific. Stop in if you're out there. Return visit to the cactus gardens at the Huntington. Unbelievably good Mexican dinner at a first-rate but little-known place in Silver Lake. Very good hotel 1 block from the beach in Santa Monica. Birthday dinner at 1 Pico (part of the Shutters Hotel). Hip French bistro in Venice (Lily's) where my son took no risk on ordering the beef tartare. The newish Frenk Gehry music hall, downtown, is stunning to see (and be in). An afternoon at the Getty Villa (the Aztec exhibit) with the Perloffs. Toured UCLA, too, which looked better than ever, despite its crumbling base of support and ballooning class sizes. We left and just a few hours letter a 7.1 quake hit. Weather, timing, everything: perfect. At right here is the famed proportionate L.A. Municipal Building reflected in the windows of an awful quick-rise police building across the street.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
