Yes, it is another national holiday and my desktop is packed full of open Adobe CS3 applications as usual. So I labor through Labor Day. I am thankful for the work and the fact that the power has kept up today. The air conditioner is cranking as we suffer yet another freak heatwave with temperatures of 100°f and climbing. In my own block we have had two four-hour power outages in a two day period. As a result I enjoyed an impromptu stoop party with the neighbors and discovered that Roni and Nina shared a fascination with me for things cuilinary. It was a pleasant, spontaneous, event and took the strain out of the situation. A strange silence pervades the air in these blackouts, one might be in Montana. I was still able to cook, but I'll get to that as you read on.
Such is life in The City of Los Angeles, a behemoth beset by small town logistics and blinkered, questionable, politics, growing way too fast for its feeble infrastructure. I first came to Los Angeles in 1976 and it was a very different place. With smog that you could cut with a knife, despite a quarter of the population we have now, it was then considered a provincial, albeit vast backwater where hedonists ruled. Large patches of open space still existed down the coast and even more so inland, all gobbled up now in the insane and continuous lebensraum. Film, Television and the Music Industry ruled the roost. No place stayed open after 10pm on The Sunset Strip apart from Ben Frank's Coffee Shop (Mel's took over the location and revamped the building) and Canter's on Fairfax in the general neighborhood. There wasn't much "culture". All that changed in the early 80s when some things were lost and some things gained, mainly tons of people who came for newly implanted industries especially the expansion of the military aerospace industry, and the resultant stress on the resources came with it. They brought their love of preservation to a town that chewed up and spat out after each bite. Live in The Now and Fix it Tomorrow Because it Might Never Come. Los Angeles is what it is, and it will be something else tomorrow. I love it for that vitality if nothing else, but it is Promethian in the worst sense.
My first taste of the southwest came with a trip to Phoenix, Arizona in 1976 with my family on one of their Grand Tours. My parents' connections in the west were limited, though they took their honeymoon here years before. They visited Paramount Studios as a guest of one of its executives and met Cecil B. DeMille, riding crop and all, on the set of The Ten Commandments. They also met Hitchcock, Stewart and gang on the remarkable set of Rear Window. Our trip in '76 was extensive, beginning in Phoenix and ending in Seattle, with the LA area, Grand Canyon, Portland and The Cascades all thrown in along the way. One of my most vivid impressions of being Someplace West came within two days of landing in the dry 100 degree heat of Arizona. It was also a shock: in the parking lot of Smitty's, in Scottsdale, a now defunct general goods chain, I locked eyes with a man who walked by me with his young daughter wearing a holstered revolver strapped to his waist cowboy style. The law in Arizona, a hangover from the olden days, made a lot of sense to gun lovers - you could not carry a concealed weapon, it had to be in plain sight, so that anyone had a chance if a fracas developed near or around you. The Southwest has gentrified itself over the last 30 years, but that is but a thin veneer over the ruff tuff frontier underbelly. Its best to remember that this is still boom or bust territory, and that includes Los Angeles.
If you picked up a copy of Sunset Magazine in those days, which seemed to be a ubiquitous coffee table staple, you might have thought that the west had been civilized with the goldrush. Gracious haciendas and majestic getaways, from Wyoming to Maui enhanced its pages and helped to maintain the staid fifties flavor the magazine still possessed in the seventies. Sunset- Living in The West is its full title, and it has stayed true to its purpose. If any magazine is successful its partly because it offers up instant pleasures. If one can't afford a holiday to Bora Bora one picks up a copy of Condé Nast Traveller and one is immediately transported in one's own head to distant exotic shores. Lackluster social life? Town and Country will give you a glimpse of your future with the glitterati. Lousy Cook? Gourmet will give you a taste of what super food is like. Jennifer Aniston not currently your friend? Get People magazine and it will give you tips on how to be her friend when you eventually do meet her. All this for a few dollars and a savings of thousands. Life by proxy.
Sunset is a special magazine that truly reflects middle class western life and it has kept up with the times. It has retained all those cozy traits of gracious living but these days it also offers up articles on some of the darker and more difficult things about living out here, such as the besieged ecology. In keeping with the dignified but never stuffy tone each article builds hope in every sentence. Sunset has become very sophisticated, by any European standard, and even more of a pleasure to browse as the west matures like a rebellious adolescent, around us. I have taken a subscription to it once again and eagerly await its monthly arrival.
Amongst the getaways and ideas for better living are the food pages which always offer a handful of nice recipes. This month's edition shows off varieties of the pears available out here with correspondingly luscious, sensual recipes to show them off. But it is the article on New Mexico chiles that caught my eye in amongst the How to Make a Pathway and How to Make a Fountain articles. I am not a connoisseur of chiles, mainly because I don't like too much pepper heat in my dishes, whether they be Indian, Thai or Mexican, but the article assured me that Anaheim chiles were mild provided you de-seeded them properly, and the recipe for Green Chile Enchiladas seemed just too mouthwatering to keep pagebound. It would not be fair to copy out the recipe here but follow the links and all is revealed. I went to market and bought 2 pounds of fresh Anaheim Chiles which I roasted on the open gas flame (this recipe calls for skin on chiles) and roasted a chicken and used its stock in the sauce. My only additions were a finely chopped carmelized onion and a little cilantro to fleck more green and flavor into the sauce. The results were fabulous and mildly peppery and I will make it again. Comfort food to be sure. Thank you, you people at Sunset Magazine, and may you comfort me on into my sunset years.
(While writing this entry we suffered a 12 hour power failure last night and really suffered for it all round).
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When you passed through in 1976, I'd been a resident of Los Angeles for just 3 years. I'd come here in 1973 to work on a graduate degree, and re-invent myself, a common denominator of many who move here, and subsequently, as Oscar Levant cogently observed, "wake up one day beside the swimming pool and realise you're 85 years old." It really is that seductive, and that casual. I'd lived in the East (New York, Boston) and had grown up and schooled in the Midwest. What impressed me about Los Angeles was the ease with which I adapted to it; I felt at home instantly, not an ounce of alienation. Since I've spent almost the entirety of my adult life here, I've had the opportunity to witness firsthand an incredible transformation, much of it exhilerating, but much of it equally regrettable. Food and its purveyance provide as good a context as any for examining this metamorphosis. In 1973, "fine dining" was confined to a few upper end restaurants proffering what has come to be referred to as "continental cuisine". It was meat and potatoes with a little Frenchiness for torque. Perrino's, Chasen's, and most impressively, Scandia, were the primary practioners. It should come as no surprise that none of them exist anymore. Alice Waters at Chez Panisse was still a Bay area novelty, and California cuisine was only just gestating. Even Thai food was rare. I recall going for the first time to the only Thai restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard between Western and Vermont with a couple of my CalArts pals, attracted by the lurid detail of it having been the scene of a Thai gang shootout, with souvenir bullet holes in the wall above our favorite booth. A happy side effect was the discovery of one of the world's great cuisines. Things began to change with the invasion of the serious French restaurants, notably Patrick Terrail and Ma Maison, which was an immediate magnet for the industry crowd. This was simultaneous with the explosion of Melrose Avenue, from sleepy backwater shortcut to Beverly Hills to one of the most phenomenal and world famous shopping districts that trendiness ever confronted. Michel Richard, Wolfgang Puck at Spago, the two "Hot Tamales" who started what developed into City and its subsequent variants, and Michael Roberts (tragically no longer among the living) at Trumps made the whole world take note. And the die was cast. The opportunity to partake of exciting and innovative cuisine grew exponentially, and continues apace to this day. But it hasn't been without its downside. In many ways, the food scene was shadowed by the music scene. The Punk movement of the late 70s was in many ways the last expression of a freer, more anarchic and fun era that died in the onslaught of "new wave" and the latest British invasion. Two events personify this phenomenon for me. I remember going to the opening of Fiorucci in Beverly Hills somewhere around the turn of the decade. Local bands were set to perform, but were summarily cut off in favor of DJ'd new disco, the song of the moment being "Warm Leatherette". Standing on stage were the shunned musicians, Exene of X leading the demo, with fists raised in protest, like VietNam era war protesters. The only thing they lacked were picket signs. The protest was short-lived and futile. The other event occured at a nightclub on Sunset about the same time. I'd gone to see a performance artist friend as part of a mixed event evening, and there was a velvet rope one had to pass to gain entrance. One of those vile turds from Vinyl Fetish, I could never figure out who was Joseph and who was Henry, worked the crowd and weeded out the undesirables. We of course ignored him when he deemed us not sufficiently ridiculous looking enough (it was the heights of New Romantic time - remember that old chestnut - Adam Ant and pirate shirts for Christ's sake) and requested that we leave. It's what I've come to refer to as the New Yorkification of LA, the Studio 54 phenomenon of selective elitism that is as shallow as it is boring. It finds its latest expression in restaurants manned in name only by New York restaurateurs that require months ahead reservations for food that is I'm told good but hardly up to the hype. We have always had the good fortune to have in this city a splendid diversity of ethnic food. We are also fortunate to have the best of fresh ingredients available in myriad specialty stores and our local farmer's markets. Even the chain markets now offer a selection of goods unthinkable 25 years ago. And for those of us who have made the effort to become good or at least passable home cooks, as you have Jonathan, the deprivation of regularly being nourished at establishments that put the mortgage in jeopardy seems of much less significance.
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