FROM BRENDAN NEWNAM, HOST OF THE DINNER PARTY DOWNLOAD, DISPATCHING FROM LOS ANGELES: Alistar Cooke had one of the greatest jobs in the world. He gallavanted around America for decades and produced a weekly “Letter from America” for the BBC.The letter was usually a blend of observations and anecdotes about life in Cooke’s adopted country. A few years back Brendan Newnam, a Philadelphia patriot, found himself in LA. It’s been two years and he still doesn’t understand what happened. In order to help him process his life in Southern California he’s agreed to share with Philebrity an occasional Letter from Los Angeles in the spirit of his radio forefather Alistar Cooke (AKA that old dude that used to host Masterpiece Theater.)

Or something like that.

Best,
Brendan

To listen, press play in the player above, or right-click here to download as an mp3. After the jump, Brendan’s letter in text form, in case you do not like the sound of a human voice.

Letter from Los Angeles –

Los Angeles is on fire. When it’s autumn in Philadelphia, trees shed their leaves, coat checks fill up and people switch from lager to porter. But here in the City of Angels, autumn means fire season. That’s because Southern California gets most of its moisture in the winter, so by the time fall arrives the region is bone dry. And this is precisely the time the famed Santa Ana winds begin to blow, turning this colossal suburb into a convection oven. The Santa Anas are brewed in the cold desert nights of the Great Basin, which abuts the city. As the air spills over the mountains and starts to barrel into LA, it gets hotter and loses its moisture, so by the time it starts whipping through the canyons and passes of LA, there is nothing left but hot dry air – an invisible blow torch looking for a spark.

The Santa Anas drive people mad. And I know that in Philadelphia that sounds like some West Coast pagan mumbo jumbo – but it’s true. Can you think of what it’s like in Philadelphia the Monday after the Eagles just had their brains beat in? I bet you can. Now combine that feeling with the giddy energy you get when you’re a child hitting the streets on mischief night. Joan Didion already wrote the essay to end all essays on the Santa Ana Winds; you can find it in her book Slouching Towards Bethelem, and I suggest you do. In it, she quotes Raymond Chandler, who wrote that when the winds blow, “meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

Soon after the Santa Anas began, fires started appearing around the city. First there was the “Tea” fire to the north, in the wealthy town of Montecito, where stars like Jeff Bridges and Oprah Winfrey have homes. Fires get their names from local landmarks, and this fire started at a historic and defunct tea café in the area. This name was particularly apt because it steeped the city in a smoky oolong haze. Soon, other fires erupted with less poetic names: there was the Sayre fire and the Freeway Complex fire. All of them filled the air with ashes that blew around the city like insects alighting on cars and homes. Pieces of love letters, report cards, unpaid for barcaloungers, pianos and hand me down kitchen spoons. Or perhaps the burnt skin of a Sonora pine that finally succumbed to its destiny – because it should not be forgotten that fire is a necessary part of life here. It cleans out the underbrush, and the intense heat germinates seeds and sets the ground for a whole new cycle of life. People aren’t wild about irony out here, but if they were, they would surely appreciate the fact that this city that uses knives and botox to keep nature at bay is constantly threatened by its failure to let nature run its course.

In the middle of this donut of actual fire, the Santa Anas were blowing the minds of everyone in the city…and the city was ready for it. For a city that likes to wake up early for yoga, there was a ton going on. Deerhoof played the Echoplex underneath Sunset Boulevard, while the LA Opera performed Carmen downtown. Local gallery and social experiment-makers Machine Project took over LACMA, and Flaunt Magazine had a spirit animal freak-out celebration. If you found yourself walking–which you probably wouldn’t–you would have heard countless clinkings of bottles and rapidfire conversation as people entertained outside. And all of this played out on a backdrop of gooey smoke sundowns the color of molten pumpkins. Closer to home, a band was spending the weekend at my neighbor’s bungalow, and every time I left or returned to my house, I stumbled across them. A boy smoking a joint and reading Norman Mailer in the bushes; a girl teaching herself a Buddy Holly song on the sidewalk.

On Friday night I visited the Chateau Marmont – the grand old dame of a hotel on the cusp of the Sunset Strip. Everyone in Hollywood has either lived or died here. Led Zeppelin once road motorcycles through the lobby and John Belushi overdosed in one of its bungalows.

As I pulled my dented Honda into the hotel’s ivy mouth, a valet walked past me with his arms outstretched. I turned and saw him sweeping paparazzi from the driveway. You see it a lot in Hollywood – a gaggle of guys standing around – they look like they’re waiting in line for concert tickets, except they have hulking cameras on their chest. Ever since the tabloids discovered that celebrities are people too, it’s been open season . The payday that comes with the right candid photo rivals anything these guys would make in the gangs many of them used to be part of. Whom these particular paparazzi were shooting for, I didn’t know. A quick scan of the hotel revealed a half dozen potential subjects. Tan foxes with silver hair. Women swaddled in black sweats and big sunglasses. As I walked from my car into the hotel, I saw a few of the paparazzi start to stir. And even though I have a face for radio, I thought for moment that with my dark attire and sunglasses they thought I was somebody. Just then they hopped into a car and peeled off after a departing Mercedes.

I was there to interview Sarah Thornton, a writer for Art Forum and The New Yorker whose recent book 7 Days in the Art World is a kaleidoscopic look at the modern art economy. I conducted the interview by the pool and due to a temporary mind blink which made me think the Arnold Palmer she had ordered was a type of cocktail, I found myself ordering a gin and tonic at 2 in the afternoon, thinking I was going along with the early-party vibe. Instead I just looked like a lush, but at least the drink helped to calm the engine that had begun revving in my chest. Perhaps the strange feeling that had come over me was a case of the cultural bends generated by my sudden shift from my workaday world to the humming lobby of the Marmont, but I’ve been in LA for over a year now and I had felt this feeling before. The real problem was that the Santa Anas were blowing in my ear.

The interview went off without a hitch and when it was done, Thornton insisted that I attend a cocktail party she was hosting to celebrate her book. For a moment I sat in the opulent lounge of the Marmont and poured chardonnay on the spark set by my mid- afternoon cocktail. Slowly the room started to fill with LA artworld superstars. I found myself on a couch speaking with dealers Jeff Poe and Honor Frasen about how a negative economy affects their artists work. And over the rim of glass I spyed the handsome Ed Ruscha. Soon I found myself chatting with a short man with close-cropped hair that looked a bit like Robert Blake. He wore a frumpy button down shirt that was something you’d buy in a gift shop in the Southwest, if your brain was suffering from dehydration. Clearly this gentleman was too famous to care. “Brendan Newnam,” I said. “Chris,” he replied. He talked about the awful traffic he encountered coming in from Topanga Canyon – that magical area above Malibu where Neil Young forged gold and where Wallace Berman defined what it meant to be a bohemian in Los Angeles. “It’s gorgeous there,” I said. “Yeah, but the traffic traveling from there to here is hell,” he said. Then he went on. “The thing is, I hardly ever leave Topanga. We leave our place maybe once a week tops. My assistants bring up everything we need.” “So you’re an artist?” “Yeah.” “Are you from LA?” “Not originally. In the late sixties I boarded a bus in Boston, landed here and never looked back. You?” “I’m from Philadelphia” I said, “and so far I’m not sure how I feel about LA.” “Philadelphia, huh, I’ve worked with the Fabric Workshop” “Yeah?” “Yeah, I’ve given them an impossible task I think. .” “What’s that?” “I want them to make a flag for me…and I want it to be on fire…all the time.”

Not unlike this city I thought.

Later, as my car fell into the line of traffic on Sunset Boulevard, and I inched out of Hollywood, it dawned on me that I had just been speaking with Chris Burden, the famous LA artist best known for his dangerous performance art pieces. I remember as a young man in Philadelphia reading about the Burden piece where he had one of his assistants shoot him with a gun from a distance of five meters. I thought that he was crazy, but now that I live here, I think I know why he did it.

From the City of Angels to the City of Brotherly Love, I’m Brendan Francis Newnam
–

Brendan Newnam is a native Philadelphian, and used to be your barista at the Quarry Street Cafe. He is now living in Los Angeles as the host of 89.3 KPCC’s The Dinner Party Download.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 5:33 pm.