Leaving

Time to see the old place again. 

It’s rather sad that I’m leaving just before the Blacknet series of post are over.   To my chagrin, the series was uneven, but like any good uneven thing, it ends in a rather bizarre note that reminds that the whole phenomenon of west coast science fiction writers were never in comparison to the schools of fiction that come from the other side of the country.  Those few guys are still around, let’s just say that they are as good as they have ever been, and that I might one or two of those guys on a relatively frequent basis from now on.

            Yes I’m writing this as I wait for a plane at the LAX airport to JFK.  Five years later is a long time to be angered at the old town, and Los Angeles treated me well enough to become a truly nice place that was more than just Hollywood, and the horrible people that habit it.  This was different.

            But the reality was that I was still running away.  I was still running from the idea of falling into tears every day after finishing writing.  Because writing is what she was good at.  And what she wrote was about life.   The life in the five boroughs, with its loud Greek restaurants, vintage stores, dive bars, and coffee shops.  That’s what she cared because that place saw her born, and saw her live.  And now? Now I just continue.  I don’t move on.  I just go forward.

Changing Tastes

(People are also into fancy ice creams now too!)            

I’m grabbing coffee in the Castro district in San Francisco when the waiter brings me an iPad so I can read the morning papers.  It seems that it is mostly standard issue today, when something suddenly grabs my attention, as I were a bull and I just got grabbed by the horns to hear all this gloom and doom that is somewhat, well, disappearing.  It’s an odd conclusion to hear on this day and age when everybody is cynical to the bone, or at least looks like.  The article written by one Adam Dominguez believes that this country is suddenly becoming “happier”, and less depressed with itself.  Dominguez cleverly mentions that not so long ago, science fiction had become all the rage in the west coast literary scene, and that it was those writers who wrote about that gloom and doom who suddenly are struggling to sell.  Just like week, the most read and talked about book in the country was not this, instead it was a book called of all things, Paradise, which was written by my very own ex-girlfriend Amy Sherman, and whose plot simply revolved around the quirky lives of quirky people living in a quirky town. Scary it was not.

                So how did this happen?  In my opinion, it probably was because the whole sci-fi phenomenon was a fad.  Quirky people living in quirky world can be a tiresome subject, but the difference now seems there are only so many depressing Blade Runner-like stories that people can stomach.  Also, books like Paradise can be brilliant escapism in a way that does not require an emotional toll from the reader,  and of course, there’s only so much genre fiction we can in an era of flying cars. And you know what? I can't complain about that.

Meanwhile, In this Side of America

(Not just his land anymore.)

Funny things happen in this side of America. One day you’re reelecting a 77-year-old as governor, instead of his 38-year-old charismatic challenger. The next day, you decide that despite the roller coaster years you just had, you’ve come to the realization that moving back east is a nonstarter. Shit was tough. My head was blurry, and yet this time, New York was no longer a threat. It was just another vacation place. The horror.

So I decide to focus on work for the foreseeable time. I write stories about the “return” of UCLA basketball. I write a story of the sudden appearance of empty seats at Staples Center (I get called Judah by a reader.), and I write about the new hotbed of science fiction writing: The city of Los Angeles.

You heard right. All the hot new sci-fi writers are making their homes in Venice, downtown, and the outskirts of the San Fernando Valley (and by outskirts, I pretty much mean Burbank). I am surprised as well. This is after all Los Angeles, the land of scriptwriters and theatre writers who are trying to become screenwriters, nevermind the fact that this is the place that gave us Joan Didion, Christopher Isherwood, John Fante, and Charles Bukowski.

So what do they write? Currently, it seems that post-apocalyptic stories are all the rage, sort of. There’s this guy who’s writing this book called “Mumbo Jumbo” which is about a plague that might not be a plague, and it’s all one giant allegory about race. It’s smart, yes, but somewhat confusing, and somewhat overbearing at times, but just like that story about “ Blacknet” that I’m currently reviewiewing for an alt. weekly, it’s full of surprises, and just like any good sci-fi story, it seems to want to say something about today. I can only hope is as good as advertised.

At the Pre-Space Society

*Inspired by: http://goo.gl/wGDHs

Many years ago, when I lived in Los Angeles, I would take the train to go to Pasadena to cover NASA for a science journal.  The then all-almighty Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was one of those things that now feels old and dated, but back then it was full of promise and fascination, or as my dad would, it was “science fiction come to life.”

            Dad was a child when moon landings were a thing to be celebrated, not chastised.  Remember the last time when the moon was not at the center of some kabuki posturing between countries over how much platinum could be extracted from the moon and what were the rules for waste disposal? Yeah, neither do I, although is not as if this was not a problem that was exclusive to the moon, since this all started once we started to run out of asteroids to feed ourselves of the metals we so desire.

            At least the JPL of that time was more fixated with Mars than with what new shiny object could be exploited in the name of the church of profit.   These kids were dorks.  Consumed by math equations and probabilities would only be solved many decades after once we realized that some things did have black and white solutions.  The downside of course is what happened after it, and the fact that we are still paying for it.   

The hall

Downtown Los Angeles was considered for many years to be afterthought.  Like most of America, all the glamour and the development it had gotten lost in the background of Hollywood and the suburbs of L.A. County. Pasadena, Venice, Malibu, they were all better places than downtown. Carmaggedon be damned.

Of course, it’s all cyclical, and once the 1990s came to downtown Los Angeles, people with money came like vultures ready to create a new modern area that would satisfy their needs once people realized that the downtown area could be more than the place where USC could expand yet again.   And so, Lillian Disney, widow of Walt, came with $50 million dollars in hand to create a concert hall close to the nascent area, now clusterfuck known as “L.A. Live” 

That concert is obviously an oddball compared to say, the Lincoln center. It has curves, and it seems to be made of aluminum that seems to scream sculpture, instead of a music hall.  If looked from across the street, it might as well fall from windstorm.

But the concert hall seems to have been built almost to perfection. It is more art than anything else, and its insides feel rather anticlimactic.  This is a place where architectural nerds flow all the time just to see its outsides, just to say that they were in a building that was designed by Frank Gehry.  Sure you can go to an actual concert at the hall, but why would you? Staring at it is enough reward.