"Nobody walks in LA" ~ Persons Missing
"Nothing works in LA" ~ Middlebrow
Solomon Grundy came on Sunday to promote his new book "Shalimar the Clown." Over the last ten years I'm batting .333 with Grundy's books, trying and failing with "The Satanic Churches" and "God Shuffled His Feet" but getting thru the literary wheelie-poppin of "Midnight's Younglings" and enjoying it. Grundy is a big writer and quite famous and the death sentence leveled against him in 1989 is still in effect. So I give him mad props for writing something that offended an entire people enough to want to kill him. Does art matter? You bet it does. When was the last time art caused a riot? And that's what this is, really, a prolonged religious riot.
"Shalimar" is about a clown who becomes a terrorist and the story apparently goes all over the world from Kashmir to LA. I like clowns (especially Kashmiri ones) so I decided to take the newish Gold Line out to Pasadena to see Mr. Grundy in the flesh. Would he have bodyguards? Would he be wearing some sort of kevlar protection? Mind you, at this point I still thought "Shalimar the Clown" might be a children's book, so I wondered if security had been lax at LAX (and, by extension, at Vroman's, the Pasadenian bookseller).
Well, I overshot my stop and got out of the train at 4 exactly, the start time of the event. I had to walk ten long blocks to the bookstore and when I finally arrived, at 4:10, I discovered there was no reading happening there at all. For the big readings, Vroman's uses a church nearby (by city hall, they think). "Well, it would have been nice if that were noted in the ad!" I grumbled to a female employee boxing up books. She shrugged. Apparently I was the only fool to take the ad at its word and not call ahead.
So I hit the streets in the direction of city hall, arriving at the church at about 4:20. The church was large, with multiple wings and entrances and no signage whatsoever. And no people. Where was everybody? I finally found the event down some stairs but there was a sign on the door saying they couldn't admit more people because fire code would be broken. There were a half dozen disgruntled folks demanding to get inside and a woman blocking the entrance, arms folded, not budging.
People kept appearing, though, and the woman would admit some but not others, driving the half-dozen disgruntled into a frenzy. "They were inside already," the woman said, "and now they are returning."
"Lady," a tallish Indian man said, very indignantly, trying to follow on the heels of the last woman admitted, "I am a STUDENT!" There was a brief pause and then woman lowered her head slightly and the man went inside and that was that. It was like some literary Jedi mind trick. I am a student! Incredible! A well-groomed lesbian couple looked over at me immediately, since E possesses the Face of Reason. "Oh, okay," one of the them said, nice and sarcastic, "Well I'M A STUDENT TOO!"
"I'm a student of life," I volunteered.
But the spell had been broken and the woman guarding the door hunkered down. We were not getting in. And this all could have been avoided had people been doing their jobs properly. One screw-up, okay, maybe, but it's like this all the time. Middlebrow is right--nothing works in LA. Nope. And just the proximity causes things (and humans) to break as well. My Elph broke, my consumer DV camera broke, everything breaks here and never gets fixed. And then there is the information, which comes at night and which is always wrong. City of Angels, Land of Errata.
Grundy was to read on Monday at Dutton's in Brentwood at 7pm and I thought briefly about attending, but a 7pm engagement in Brentwood would be a 5 hour commitment. I'd have to leave at about 5:15 to get there by 6:30 and the event probably wouldn't start on time and then there would be the drive home. Sorry Grundy, but five hours is a little much. Even for you. Even for clowns.
4 comments:
You have to up the stakes and say, "I'm a graduate student. I'm writing my bloody dissertation on the man!"
This is the sort of madcap, slapstick event that causes me to stay in at night and watch TV. Really. And I hate readings, by the way (although I'm giving one in November, everybody come!), for the reasons that are nascent in your post: readings, especially of famous people, are pompous, inflated events. They make me want to do something rude, like burp really, really loud. (Please, no one do this at my reading, as I never actually do it. Just feel like it.)
I sometimes think I hate readings. But I hate the furniture: the uncomfortable chairs, the loud sighers, the knowing nodders. But sometimes, (Anne Carson!) readings can be transformational events. More often, though, they are just a lot of traffic. But sometimes there is wine and cheese!
Yes, yes, the knowing nodders, yes...yes indeed...
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