Read L.A: Ruben Martinez's Territories

A COUPLE of weeks ago, Professor Ruben Martinez, who is the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing here at Loyola Marymount University (and my longtime colleague), spoke passionately about his time served here in Los Angeles as journalist, poet, performance artist and pundit -- and how at one point all of that seemed to have merged. He also spoke eloquently about race and class; gentrification; about communities and causes that had been marginalized by the media; about how a writer finds his/her voice while attempting to describe life from the inside out, make the invisible visible.

Post session, I asked him to share a few of his favorite/resonant texts that deal with Los Angeles. Pulling from various sources and disciplines, he didn't stick to the page as you'll see.

Top-of-the-head response from a quick email:

ask the dust , john fante
white album, joan didion
chavez ravine (the album, the play, the book of photographs)
& of course city of quartz, mike davis

- L.G.

Hummus and Tamales

A QUICK  note to alert you all to Prof. Ruben Martinez' piece that ran in the Los Angeles Times' Op-Ed section on Sunday.  It ran as he read it in our preview.

BTW, One of the local bloggers, Jesus Sanchez on his Eastsider L.A. blog, also seized on the Hummus and Tamales metaphor Martinez used as a way to explore the cultures coming together in his gentrifying Mt. Washington neighborhood.

(image via umich.edu)

Arteries of Memory: Speedway

Speedway, Venice, ca. 1982.


I LIVED there in a first floor apartment in "Four Floors West," a building with front door on the boardwalk and the back door on Speedway, the alley parallel to the boardwalk. I think of it often when the marine layer rolls in, the street lamps haloed and the cold which otherwise wouldn't be so cold really getting to you because it's so damp. The memory brings an admixture of emotion—nostalgia, anticipation, fear, which follows the contours of what my life was then. I was a déclassé bohemian, living just one rung above the streets, sleeping on a sofa in a friend's apartment, improvising life in the way only kids in their early 20s can. I wanted to be a poet, in the Bukowski or Beat mode. I could have gotten into a lot more trouble than I did, but I did get into some, the echoes of which are still with me today. But anyway, there was a musician who became a mentor whose street nickname was "Cooch" (don't ask) and he would always tell me, "What dies in the ocean washes up on the shore, what's dying on the land comes to the sea." This was pre-gentrification Venice. Like Fante's Bunker Hill: most of us were poor, a lot of us were scheming to survive. The thing about living on the beach in LA is that the Santa Anas have to be really strong to blow all the marine air out. It could be 100 degrees in Pasadena, and foggy-chilly at the beach. And with the fallen human tableau of Venice at that time, the whole atmosphere was elegiac... breakers crashing unseen beyond the scrim of gray.

-- Ruben Martinez

(photo: Speedway Westminster Venice by Michael Dorausch via flickr creative commons)