What's Cookin'?

Tacos are one of the great joys of life in Los Angeles. The variety of tacos, and of the places where they are made and sold and eaten is truly astounding. I feel that I have only scratched the taco surface of the city and I have encountered tacos made from beef, pork, goat, lamb, chicken, duck, fish, shellfish, bivalves, insects, potatoes, cactus, cheese, assorted other vegetables, even a little fruit and pretty much any part or preparation of any of that that you can think of. I mostly eat tacos made with soft corn tortillas, but you can find them with fried tortillas or flour tortillas too.

I've never eaten a taco made from human meat, at least not that I'm aware of. But I like the signs:



The pig cooking the man graces the side of Taqueria El Trampitas, at the corner of Main Street and Gage in Southcentral L.A. I ate there yesterday and the more traditional tacos - man cooking pig (picture below) - of carnitas and al pastor were good, if not great.



The goat cooks woman taqueria is just about four blocks up Main Street, in a stretch of three blocks that seems to be dedicated to eating goat. (There must be five or six places to eat goat within a three block area.) I was too full to do anything other than stop and take a picture. I'll have to go back.



The goat in the picture is saying: "Como que birria buey." Birria is "goat," or at least cooked goat. Buey is "ox." This must mean something in colloquial Mexican-Spanish, but I can't quite figure it out. If anyone out there reading this can, please let me know.

I have since come up with two possible translations. In Mexican Spanish, "buey" is colloquially used for "asshole." One figurative translation is: "How does that feel asshole?" Another, more literal translation is: "How's that [version of] birria asshole?"

I've been on something of a taco quest lately. My favorites so far are the carne asada and the al pastor at La Taquiza at 30th and Figueroa, near USC. Still, I have a mere passing interest in tacos. If you want to follow an expert's mania for tacos, you can take a look at Bandini's The Great Taco Hunt. He has never steered me wrong.

I have also resumed my slow but sure progress toward traversing the entire length of the mighty Los Angeles River.

Now most people think I'm joking when I refer to it as "mighty." Some people don't even know it exists, they think it is simply a concrete drainage ditch. But L.A. wouldn't have come into existence without its river.

The Mississippi River, at about 2,350 miles long, is more than 45 times as long as the Los Angeles River at 52 miles. No surprise there. But the Los Angeles is steeper. It drops 795 feet in elevation from its headwaters at the Canoga Park High School football field in the Valley to where it spills into the ocean near the Queen Mary in Long Beach. By comparison, the Mississippi drops a mere 645 feet along its entire length.

At its peak flow, the mighty Los Angeles carries 183,000 cubic feet of water per second out to the Pacific Ocean. (According to the website of The River Project, that's the equivalent of 40 million garden hoses going full blast.) It's also 14 times the flow of New York's Hudson River.

One of the bike paths along the river is near my house. Here are a few pictures I took on a recent ride:

A Grinch, But a Charitable One

Don't worry, this isn't all going to be me being grumpy about Christmas, but I have to get that part off my chest so if you don't want to read it you can skip the next few paragraphs.

First off, why the hell is Christmas a national holiday? It is the only national holiday with non-secular origins. Despite the fact that it has become a seemingly non-religious orgy of bling and material cravings, its very name "Christ-mas" betrays where it comes from. In the spring we've got spring break and a scattering of holidays that go along with it. Some people still refer to it as "Easter Break" and that's their right. But there is no national Easter holiday. I've got nothing against "Winter Break" or celebrating the solstice - a natural phenomenon - but I don't want my government giving legal standing to anything of religious origin, no matter how far it has travelled away from its creche. With all the current battling over the separation of church and state, it astounds me that Christmas has managed to somehow stay above the fray. Maybe that's because everyone's afraid if they say anything about it they won't get any presents under their tree.

It's hardly worth carrying on about the dreadful, oppressive music; the forced and often hypocritical good cheer and goodwill; the porcine greed of shopkeepers preying on the terror that parents and partners and nearly everyone else has of not satisfying the craven desires of those who expect gifts; or the traffic.

Well, maybe I will whine about the traffic. Where do they all come from? Does half the population avoid going out in public the rest of the year? It seems as if people who neither drive nor shop on a regular basis, suddenly emerge from hiding and hit the streets and stores in a tsunami that sweeps all before it. Addled by their daunting tasks, no less so than if they were on heavy drugs, they smash into each other on highways and roads, in parking lots, with shopping carts, careening down sidewalks laden with loot.

If you're a Christmas lover, it's safe to read from here on...

Okay, so now you know I don't like Christmas. The best Christmas I ever spent was in Dakar, Senegal. I ate a fantastic pepper steak and drank a great bottle of red wine. Then I went and danced and boozed the night away with a crowd of about three dozen prostitutes, one white girl from Oregon (my traveling companion) and a dozen or so men - eight of whom were in the band that played in a scrapwood barn of a place near the railroad tracks. We all went out to breakfast on the beach when the sun rose.

But still, it's that time of year and you've gotta give gifts or suffer the consequences. Luckily it's also near the end of the year when it makes sense to work out your tax deductions - a much more honest reason for giving this time of year then trying to promote the fiction that something about the season makes you feel more generous than usual. I'm not saying that my charitable impulses are entirely pure. I tend to donate money throughout the year whenever it occurs to me to do so, or it seems like it might be needed. I even donate to organizations such as the ACLU that do not bestow tax deductions on me.

It is a very good thing that there are charities who do a good job of doing our dirty work for us.

This year, as I tend to every year, I donated what I could to Doctors Without Borders. I'm not about to go to Darfur and get in everybody's way trying to help in a refugee camp. They are. And they do a great job of it without any political or religious agenda to promote. They also have one of the best ratios of program spending to administrative and fund raising costs in the charity biz. I made a donation in the name of the Stone Family and sent cards. The relatives are going to have to make do this year with some antibiotics and rehydration in Central Africa rather than another ugly sweater, book I know they won't read unless I buy it for them, CD of music I want them to like or the latest breakable toy or gadget.

Eva and I went to Heifer International on behalf of the nieces and nephew. They've now got some money with which they can pick out a farm animal to donate to a needy Third World family. It's a great idea and seems like the sort of thing that might get kids involved in charity in a fun sort of way. (We're kind of hoping they don't notice the part of the catalog where it points out that the cute little bunny rabbits make good eating.) But then the nine-year-old niece said: "Not another water buffalo." Apparently another set of relatives had the same idea. We'll show her. They're probably coming to visit next year. I think I've got a good rabbit recipe somewhere.

As for Eva, luckily she doesn't like bling and we've got a moratorium on buying any more wine for the house. She did love Cambodia when we were there. And she is adamant on many women's issues. A column by Nicholas Kristoff in today's NY Times (you might have to be a registered reader to use this link) gave me a good idea. I got her a year of school for a girl in Cambodia. I got one for me too while I was at it. With some extra money thrown in to help build and stock and staff a school. This was all done through an organization started by a journalist, called American Assistance for Cambodia. This group will be hearing more from my bank account during the coming year. My next book which will be published in Fall 2007, GRAVE IMPORTS, is about the smuggling of stolen Cambodian antiquities. It seems only fair that some of the proceeds will find their way back to that country.

That was the seasonal gift giving taken care of. Throughout the year I also coughed up bucks to a number of other worthy (IMHO) causes: The Emma Goldman Papers Project, The Center for Inquiry (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), Books for Laos, Fringe Benefits, and a few other things connected to events and local museums and NPR stations.

I am not writing all this to demonstrate how great and caring I am. But these are organizations that I think are doing important and good work and that I like to support. I'm hoping that at least a few of my readers might come across this blather of mine, be looking for a place to send some of their money, and might consider donating to some of these groups as well.

For your information, here's how I decide what organizations to donate to:

I'm an atheist, so they can't have any religious affiliation, much less agenda.

My politics are a complicated mishmash of things. I am not any sort of ---ist, (other than the previously mentioned lack of religious belief.) I don't believe in any sort of ---ism. (There was a time when I described myself as a "Groucho Marxist" but I won't even go that far anymore.) So if it is an aid organization, they can't have any sort of political affiliation or agenda either.

I don't think that professional do-gooders should be getting fat off my donations, so I do what I can to make sure that a much higher percentage of my money is going to the actual projects, than is going to administrative and fund raising expenses. In 2005, for instance, 85.71% of the money raised by Doctors Without Borders went to program services. That is a very high percentage. A good place to start figuring this out is Charity Navigator.

And sometimes I just donate to things that I appreciate for the fruits of their labors. The Emma Goldman Papers Project is an example of that. I think they are creating an archive of significant historical importance and interest, in a field that has been sorely neglected. (I've also loved reading the first two volumes of the four volume set that they're working to put out.)

So I guess that's my Season's Greetings to you all. Next Fall will see the publication of GRAVE IMPORTS (look for Chapter One, or an excerpt on the website sometime in the next few months), as well as the paperback of THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD. I'm currently working on a new novel that has nothing to do with my Ray Sharp series and I'm raking through the coals that make up my brain in an attempt to come up with a good non-fiction topic that will give me an excuse to travel.

Let's hope we all have a great New Year and that 2007 sees at least a little improvement over 2006.

Mistress Eva is Dead

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/09.02.99/norvind-9935.html

I knew this woman. I recently found out that she died. When Eva, my Eva, the one I now live with, first called me at my mother's house many years ago and my mother picked up the phone, my mother was most disappointed that she wasn't "Mistress Eva."

I met Mistress Eva when I lived in Los Angeles before moving to Hong Kong, I think around 1982 or so. I lived in the lower part of a duplex. One day I went upstairs at around 5pm to ask my neighbor a question. My neighbor, a witch who had coven meetings every full moon, wasn't home. But the front door was open and a tall blonde woman wearing a skintight black and purple leather body suit unzipped to about her belly button with, maybe, seven inch spike-heeled boots, was sitting on the sofa and drinking a Miller Hi-Life out of the bottle while listening to some sort of syrupy folk music.

I introduced myself. She introduced herself as Eva. She asked if I wanted a beer. I got a beer and sat on the sofa with her and we chatted about this, that and the other thing, mostly politics, art and music. I seem to recall that she liked John Irving and got annoyed with me when I said that he kept writing the same book over and over and over and I hoped that one day he'd feel like he got it right. I slowly worked the conversation around to what, exactly, it was that she did.

She whipped people, of course, and tormented them in various other ways as well. Mostly men, mostly powerful, rich men, but some women too. She didn't ever touch them, never. The closest she got to that was when something she was holding, like a whip or a cattle prod, touched them. And they certainly never touched her. And she charged a minimum of $300 per hour for this. She lived in New York and was visiting L.A. for the grand opening of a new dungeon in West Hollywood, and to visit some clients, and somehow or another she ended up staying with my upstairs neighbor.

So Mistress Eva and I became pals. Most days she'd get home from work and I'd be at home because I was writing and doing photography and worked out of my home, and she would more often than not change into jeans and a t-shirt and we'd get a bit drunk together and chat.

She finally invited my neighbor and I to the grand opening of the dungeon. It was on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. We walked in and were offered a tray with glasses of champagne, served by a middle-aged man in a French maid outfit. We wandered about the place, nibbling on canapes and sucking back champagne and good French wine and having casual conversations while all around us people were being whipped, sliced with razors, stuck in holes in the floor with only their heads poking out so that they could be more easily peed on, and any manner of other Sadeian sort of goings on, going on. Eva was too busy to talk much with us. At one point I brought her a white wine and a smoked salmon with creme fraiche and caper on toast, then briefly held her whip for her while she consumed them.

I lost track of Mistress Eva not long after that. But then a friend of hers, a beautiful crazy, brilliant Mexican filmmaker came to stay upstairs. One night I got a knock on my door at about 2am and it was Mistress Eva’s friend in tears. My upstairs neighbor had raped her, or tried to, or made very unwelcome advances, or something. I took her in. I gave her something to drink. I asked if she wanted to call the cops, take a shower, sit in a chair, whatever. She jumped my bones. We had about a one month fucked up, torrid affair that ended with my screaming at her when one night I was sick - 103 degree fever, throwing up, shaking and shivering sick - and we had a dinner date and I called to tell her that I couldn't make it. She showed up at my place a half hour later - she was no longer living upstairs - and practically tore down my door, stormed around my tiny little apartment demanding to know where I was keeping "the whore" and ended up scratching the hell out of me. She didn't believe that I was sick. Unfortunately I had already puked up everything I had in me, so I couldn't vomit on her to make her understand.

Then she went away and that was the last I ever saw or heard of her.

Until now. Many years passed. I’m now a guy with a website. You can see where this is going. So who do I get an email from out of the blue but Mistress Eva’s friend, the crazy, Mexican filmmaker. She is somewhere, I think in Mexico. She remembers me fondly. (I remember her fondly, with some reservations, too.) She remembers my "watery eyes" and thinks they had something to do with me being a Cancer, or is that a Gemini? (I think they must have had something to do with allergies.) Mistress Eva is dead, she writes, drowned in Mexico while making a film about a man with no arms. “She gave herself to [the sea], naked , free ... and stubborn. She was told the sea was too rough, she replied that she was an excellent swimmer.”

Once again, the wonders of the Internet. It is increasingly difficult to hide from one’s past. I’m not so sure I want to anyhow.

Amnesia Needed & Some Other Stuff

What the world needs is a highly contagious, non-fatal, fast-spreading virus that erases memories. To be really effective, the disease needs to also infect books, dissolving those pages with records of historic conflicts.

Last week I was watching Ted Koppel on The Daily Show. He was talking about his new reportage on Iran. One of our primary bones of contention with Iran can be traced back to the taking over of our embassy in Tehran and the holding of American hostages for 444 days. Go back a bit further, to 1953, and the Iranians remember when we overthrew their democratically elected government and replaced it with the Shah - a brutal dictator. That's a relatively recent problem that some amnesia could help fix.

When I turned off the TV I turned to my reading: William T. Vollmann's Rising Up And Rising Down. (I'm most of the way through volume five "Studies in Consequences.") That night I read the opening chapters of the section on the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The grievances that everyone is fighting over in that part of the world go back to at least 1389. There was a slaughter. Then a retaliatory slaughter. Then one in revenge for that and so on up into the "modern" era when the ancient animosities led to everyone choosing up sides against each other in the Second World War and it's all still going on. (Okay, so there's a lull at the moment, but I would not take odds that it will last forever.) They could use some deeper amnesia in their part of the world.

The next morning I read the newspaper. The Israelis and Palestinians were swapping killings again in Gaza. Who the hell even knows who got to any of those places first? Israelis will tell you that they did; it's the promised land that Moses led them to and they've been there ever since. Palestinians will tell you that they were there when the Israelis showed up and they've been there ever since. Either the Israelis or the Palestinians and Arabs - depending on who you're talking to - tried to drive the others out of their homes when Israel was created by UN mandate. No one really knows who started it, who was there first, who killed who first, or anything that could possibly rely on history to resolve the questions of today. There's plenty of historic "evidence" to support all sides of the conflict.

Won't someone erase these people's memories and free them from the chains of their perceived histories?

There's an old saying that is all too often accepted as a truism: "He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it." But the saying itself is a good example of the problem of history. It's been attributed to Sisyphus, various French philosophers, Karl Marx, Winston Churchill and a slew of other notables. No one actually knows who first said it. It just sounds good.

But the other morning I was thinking it might be time for an update. Something along the lines of: "He who thinks he remembers history is condemned."

World Starts Fresh Day
If no one can come up with a biological fix for this memory conundrum, maybe it's time for an international holiday; the annual, perhaps bi-annual, "International - World Starts Fresh Day." At exactly 12:01am every World Starts Fresh Day, no one will be permitted to use any historical arguments to press their case about anything. They have to start fresh, as if they just woke up and found themselves, surprise surprise, in the situation that they're in, and now they have to make the best of it.

They'll be allowed to keep their history books only so long as they regard them as, and teach them as literature; no more, no less. Much as the Bible and the Koran and the Teachings of Buddha and all that stuff ought to be regarded and taught. Anyone who acts on their perception or interpretation of history will be rounded up and sent for re-education. If they fail to learn their lesson, they should be transported, isolated from the rest of us, so that we can live in peace. Australians, as a people, seem like they're concerned about world peace. They'd probably be willing to move elsewhere to make way for those who remember their history to be marooned on their island. It might even appeal to those who remember Australia's history.

Enough's Enough
Now I'm going to try and forget about what I saw, heard and read last week, other than the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale. It is the best Bond movie in a very long time. Daniel Craig is by far the best Bond since Sean Connery, maybe even as good as Connery. He has the air of menace about him that makes him seem a more likely killer. And best of all, the action is driven by stunts, not by gadgets and special effects. There's a chase scene that is worthy of the best of Jackie Chan. There's even a stunt person listed in the opening credits.

And lastly, I seem to have been getting a lot of spam email lately from people flogging bad stocks. There is one group, however, that sends them with truly wonderful subject lines. Here are some of my favorites:

Impudent statesmanship
Sadist assembly line
Manliness gratuitous
Good Book refugee
Very Woof
Realism sheepish
Protagonist detention
Garbage can voyage
Indisputable sadly
Mistook deadpan
Sticky democratic
Sickening yep
Eccentricity probe
Chicken feed alcoholic
Flatulence wide-eyed
Guy drunkenness
Insufferable champion
Strenuous vomit
Token prosperous
Perky coolness
Estranged pajamas