Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Los Angeles












 

Los Angeles, city of the doomed
Los Angeles, city of the doomed
Well I loved you once but I gotta go yeah







 
San Francisco, city pretty by the bay
San Francisco, city pretty by the bay
Well I loved you once but I gotta go yeah









NOTE:  Unfortunately, I am unable to post an audio link to "Los Angeles,"  the Gene Clark song which was first released several years ago on the A&M Flying High collection in the UK.  It's a splendid, highly unusual song.  Both the recording and the thoughts expressed in the song feel unfinished, unresolved, which suits the song's mood, but might also account for Clark's decision (if it was indeed his decision) not to release it.  The song's final verse has the girl in the song trying to decide whether San Diego is the place she should remain.   

I myself love Los Angeles, the city.  It's been a big part of my life since my first, rather belated, physical visit (by which I mean to say, that I, like so many people grew up on television and movie images of Los Angeles in such abundance that they constituted a definite aspect of daily waking and sleeping reality) in May, 1979, when I traveled there with my father and viewed  the city's culture through the twin lenses of his business interests, which were focused on the garment industry and real estate investment, and my own more music industry-oriented concerns.  Raymond Chandler culture entered in also and meeting a new ocean was, as it should be, a life-changing experience.  

San Francisco came later for me and I think I will try to tell that story another time, although I would be remiss in not mentioning the artichoke fields of Castroville and the garlic pastures of Gilroy.

"Refuse From A Silver Phial"  (link) is a great Gene Clark/Los Angeles song, so I've posted it here as compensation for the missing "Los Angeles."  Sleeping in the guest room tonight with Andy (home from back surgery and confined to his crate), I was thinking about it all night, rolling around on the daybed, restlessly and incoherently.  With his unselfconscious, bright optimism, Andy's story is pretty much the opposite of the one Gene tells in this haunting masterpiece about the girl with the mind "that slept inside tomorrow," seeking "not to be a victim."

Gene covers the whole state of California in "Los Angeles," but the Kansan's range as a writer was about as big and wide as the Pacific, his adopted waterfront.  Painting with prepositions, Gene created irresistible, inexhaustible mystery maps.

2 comments:

  1. Oh my, Curtis. Poor Andy. Greater love hath no man.

    Your top photo has put me in mind of the wonderful improvised sequence with Elliott Gould and his cat at the beginning of The Long Goodbye.

    The last several times I've watched that film, over the many years now, I've spent the last 100 minutes or so worrying and wondering about that cat.

    I've had to remind myself of that truism we find so difficult to grasp, in our first childhood moviegoings.

    "It's not really real. Stop worrying. They aren't really dead. Yes, the people do have to go to the bathroom some times. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not happening."

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  2. Please rest assured (if assurance will provide rest and relief) that we worry about The Long Goodbye cat also. We just love that movie, which is so effective on so many levels including, most importantly, the way Elliot Gould just nails the Marlowe role. The rest of the cast (the unexpected Nina van Pallandt, the really surprising Jim Bouton), plus Henry Gibson, Mark Rydell and, of course, Sterling Hayden are so fine also. One actual life by-product that emerged from the movie was that my father decided to copy encasing his vodka bottles in ice. It was a trick you couldn't learn from the internet then, obviously. We love that movie and especially the cat and the crazy girl neighbors making the brownies. Did you know, by the way, that both Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse attended Dulwich College outside of London? Also, I recently learned, Phil Manzanera (real given name Targett-Adams; he took his stage name from his Colombian mother), Roxy Music's guitarist? Curtis

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