Author: Nathan Marsak

Again with the AFL (set your 47p wayback machine for October 9)-fortunately, we’ve since learned that whacking labor leaders and firing into crowds with the odd SKS are the preferred methods of contract negotiation.

Culinary workers? Long hours, sure, but they don’t hurt for eatin’. AFLCW didn’t hurt for anything, being one of LA’s famously corrupt mob puppets before their eventual implosion.

The Bombay Palace, at 8690, is a prewar brick building with a new façade. But our Vallera’s at 8680 is lost to the winds, the winds that carried off the last stench of class struggle-

My, isn’t this riot of AFL window-smashing & stench-bombing charmingly old school? Less charming, we must suppose, should you have to smell the stench.

FYI, should you need to show your displeasure with the company unions by the boss making by the workers double cross: hydrated lime may be purchased where cement is sold, and sulfur is the primary ingredient in rose dust; mix at one to two, add water and heat. Pour off into a container leaving the lime residue behind. Now add sulfate of ammonia (also in your garden department). Stir, cover, drain through cheesecloth into the bottle you’re about to throw, and there you have it. You now know as much as the Folks of 47 and we implore each and every proletariat on the side of the pin-setters to begin stench bombing Los Angeles in earnest. You have nothing to lose but your chains and stuff.

One cannot judge Mrs. Gavrus too harshly. This was, after all, a full 25 years before Alice Cooper recorded “Dead Babies,” his warning against just this sort of occurance.

But it was 1947. A time when not only were there no childproof caps, but all seemingly harmless drugs contained deadly poison.

Maybe ol’ DG is crazy like a fox. Consider-pull at stunt like this within a year of the Dahila, and you’re gonna be picked up for some serious questioning. However, once they’ve cleared you of that heinous event, won’t an overtaxed PD’ll be less likely to burden themselves with a a simple leg-carver? This is Christmas, not Thanksgiving.

Nice to know the pair in question will be played by Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey in the MOW.

What burns me up is that the papers don’t mention in which hôtel Graeff shacked up the young bride. There are many. Here are a few.

A decidedly post-1947 complex of late-fiftiesiana has replaced the Mills’ death apartment. Hail the authoritative and striking Berendo Vista! Certainly we must imagine suicides of only the finest and most modern order conduct themselves here.

Despite my love of the Mills’, after having blogged about nurses a scant two days ago, I was hoping Kim would go with this story:

-because I’d hate to see another nurse, of whom I love collectively, whose mints on the pillows of the ol’ Hotel du Crazy are always fresh, fall through the cracks of 21 December 1947. That a blarney-smooching nurselet shall hang from a kookootown window, turning herself that particular shade of necrophile grey, is to be forgotten on my watch? Think not, dear reader.

Hey look, that’s one of the many Edward Sibbert-designed Kress department stores (this being from 1935, ogle those setbacks) on the right. That’s a 1928 JJ Newberry Company on the left.

Christmas shopping represents nothing more than a Consumer Confidence Index precisely mirrored against the Death of the Earth. When our last National Treasure, the choked and gasping American Landfill, dies via poison spilled from Christmas’ gaping chasm, we shall recall the time when the only terrors visited upon us were those involving popgun-wielding desperadi. As we suck in our final breath of outgassed CFCs we will beg for the Kress bandit’s bullet to put us out of our postmodern misery!

On behalf of the 1947project, I invite you to consume as hard as you can, while there is still time. Thank you for your attention.

There is no profession more honorable than nursing, and I steadfastly believe all nurses give 110% to their craft. Such said, I’ve found nurses-having known an inordinate quantity for some reason-to be emotionally damaged sex addicts with rather pronounced substance abuse problems. Like yours truly. Which is why I like them so much, or at least that’s why I’ve known so many.

In any event, the Nurse: like the Cop, she spends her days with her head in the human toilet, seeing people only at their lowest ebb. Is it any wonder they garb themselves in black and take in a lonely GI ACP as their only friend?

Here’s where my new delightful intended Fay Young lived:

Note her small apartment building just there to the left of the Gates Hotel. Both of which are gone, having been replaced like so:

(Orient yourself in the two pix via Wurdeman & Becket’s 1946 Mobil Oil/General Petroleum bldng peeking from the corner.)

And where Fay boosted some schmendrik who so dearly deserved to be relieved of his nine dollars:

Relatedly, on a Los Angeles streetcorner I recently reacquainted myself with M—– R—–, former nursing student and former girlfriend of mine at that, who now panhandles to support her, uh, nursing habit.

Longshoremen are best kept down on the, uh, longshore. They come inland, and trouble ensues.

But Longshoreman Rufus came up he did, just a few blocks from where Simon Rodia was toiling away on his towers, to set a house full of children (plus one old lady) ablaze.

Fifty-eight years later, and still no-one’s built there.

There are a number of lots empty in the neighborhood, not just ’65-era commercial blocks-come-parking lots, but vacant plots of residential, like this lot two doors down from Vera Dudley’s.

The work of longshoremen, no doubt.

The house to which she vainly attempted to walk:

And the road she walked down:

The streetcar mentioned in the story was probably on Fletcher. A road near a streetcar, that’s good. A road with hidden brain-beating, cranium-crushing madmen lurking in the shadows, not so good.

The Little Pink House where Esther hunches over her Underwood, tapping out threats, copy-editing extortion.

And a block away, poor Rodman the Grocer hunkers down to wait out the storm. Maybe he was padding the grocery bill. Or maybe there was something else. Something more lurid. Or something insane, on somebody’s part. The wife is more involved in this than we are led to believe, and Esther’s lucky she didn’t end up with poisoned meat, and the market has had some sort of mock-Mansard roof attachment, and one way or another, this is going to end in tears.

Colleen, it would seem, is the sacrifice. She somehow represents that which is rejected by God. Harold, as both the younger brother and Cain, has therefore offered the sacrifice to his elder, who conversely is Abel. Murrill embodies Abel, a shepherd in a lean-to, a lazy and pointless taker who favors and is favored by God, a God who is in fact himself, by the void and for his brother. And his brother Cain, history’s first worthwhile man, fountainhead of art and thought, founder of the first city and lifespring of civilization, has a gun.

And one must remember, that in the time of Cain and Abel, murder was not forbidden by God. Blam. Blam. Blam.

And here is where the earth was stained by bloodshed.

Once a Van Nuys lean-to, it is now a house abandoned, sick, wrong. Why? When life was first shed, God said “And now cursed art thou from the ground, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be in the earth.”

And where did the fratricidal tiller go? Where is the land of Nod? La Habra?

Where Calvert once cut through the Valley, it has been torn up and replaced by the Civic Center.

Harold’s house was on this spot, now the Van Nuys Branch Library (Glenn Arbogast & Assc., 1963). Fitting, as he was progenitor of Lamech, father of music and meteallurgy. (Note the Van Nuys City Hall, nee Valley Municipal Building [Peter K. Scharborum, 1932] looming in the background like the Tower of Babel.)

Most cities are made up of collected Seth, borne to a chastened and humbled Eve. But LA’s angel is the boastful, prideful mother who gave us Cain, the man who settled in the land of wandering. The man who, sometimes, just has to strike down his brother.