Wednesday, March 02, 2005
The Road through Bakersfield
From June 15th, 2004:
08:04 am Downtown Bakersfield Breakfast
I should mention that earlier we ate at another diner. A bowl of oatmeal, some mixed fruit: delicious grapes, strawberries, and melon; and a side of bacon. You can’t help it. You walk into these places and smell the morning coffee and bacon and you have to have some of the decadence that people around here have daily. The old timers talked about their business ventures. I didn’t care to listen except for the conversation I heard about cattle and dairy herds from a denim-wearing gentleman who ate biscuits and gravy. I only caught wisps of it, but chuckled when I heard them talk of walking a pig like a wheelbarrow: “They’ll go anywhar you want em to go, when you got em by thar hind legs.” The waitress had a distinct twang too—you could tell she had been talking to guys like these for years. And LA is only 110 miles away.
10:23 am Hollywood’s Backyard
This valley—the Southern San Joaquin—really is filled with a cross section of fertile land and Texas-style hospitality. I noticed a lot of trucks on the freeway and highway that parallels it; and those migrants in the grape vineyards on the edge of Bakersfield. This is their home. The home of UFW headquarters and all that. Somebody in town yesterday said Cesar Chavez was buried up in the mountains we ascended earlier. The mountains are golden grass covered at first. You notice this when you make the climb. That’s the climb the Joads descended, old Henry Fonda in Grapes of Wrath. See—a movie just for a novel, and filmed here. This place is rich—it’s Hollywood’s backyard. So many people over the mountain don’t care about origins of film. They just want to be in something cutting edge—fast-moving high tech effects. Where’s my overalls and bare feet? That’s what I need. A Japanese beetle hit the windshield as we passed some groves. Metallic green and golden, its legs twitched before the wind finally whipped it into the valley, end over steely end.
12:11 pm Highway 14 Desert Movies
Highway 14 is one of those desert highways where RVs and tanker trucks drive slowly along the Sierra’s Mojave edge. As they move across a shrub-covered horizon, cars bunch up behind them, which is just enough annoyance to cause the occasional driver to bravely pass into oncoming traffic. That’s us. But we don’t realize we’re close to death, do we? We skip heading straight into California City and decide to make a ten-mile journey out of our way to Red Rock Canyon. It’s a quick tour into one of the sacred beating hearts of the film industry. Here, still in the same county as Bakersfield, but just outside of the valley, giant bugs attacked starship troopers, Natives fought battle after battle in the Hollywood rugged West against lonesome Homesteaders, and cavalry charged up desert hills; cowboys with parched lips got lost in the desert, Capricorn One astronauts hid out and ate snakes; and not to forget, Boris Karloff as a mummy made such a desert canyon an Egyptian land of mystery. I'm looking forward to tonight already. Can you tell?
03:33 pm Touching the Lips of M****
M**** has the best lips of anyone I know. They’re full, but not fake; kissable, deliciously so. You look into her chocolate brown eyes and find your senses pulled to those lips, so lipsticky, so moist, with intelligent words dripping out, always looking for the mysterious, always memorizing, tantalizing. She works her movie-made magic like no other. Of course there is this eternal problem. When she does a reading in front of a director, she clams, those full lips straighten; she loses her grip on her senses she had just mastered moments before for days on end. To lose it so fast; she said recently, “I do it time and again. It’s why the great movies aren’t mine. Sure I’m a leading lady type—if the Hollywood moguls would look at me that way. But once you reach a certain age without that one great film under your belt, it all slips away.” It does, like the eroded canyons I saw earlier. The red rocks like rosy cheeks. But then, they’re in great films; just a backdrop anymore.California City is a whirlwind to pass through, a dust devil of a town. But Hollywood’s here. You can see the fingerprints on every corner, in the settled desert dust, the hamburger joint windows full of grease, and the sound studio. The people here all talk of the last movie as if it were filmed yesterday, and expect more to come. It’s an endless cycle. They do come. We’re here aren’t we? I’m going to a meeting. We’re going to do some planning. ¶ 3:30 AM
08:04 am Downtown Bakersfield Breakfast
I should mention that earlier we ate at another diner. A bowl of oatmeal, some mixed fruit: delicious grapes, strawberries, and melon; and a side of bacon. You can’t help it. You walk into these places and smell the morning coffee and bacon and you have to have some of the decadence that people around here have daily. The old timers talked about their business ventures. I didn’t care to listen except for the conversation I heard about cattle and dairy herds from a denim-wearing gentleman who ate biscuits and gravy. I only caught wisps of it, but chuckled when I heard them talk of walking a pig like a wheelbarrow: “They’ll go anywhar you want em to go, when you got em by thar hind legs.” The waitress had a distinct twang too—you could tell she had been talking to guys like these for years. And LA is only 110 miles away.
10:23 am Hollywood’s Backyard
This valley—the Southern San Joaquin—really is filled with a cross section of fertile land and Texas-style hospitality. I noticed a lot of trucks on the freeway and highway that parallels it; and those migrants in the grape vineyards on the edge of Bakersfield. This is their home. The home of UFW headquarters and all that. Somebody in town yesterday said Cesar Chavez was buried up in the mountains we ascended earlier. The mountains are golden grass covered at first. You notice this when you make the climb. That’s the climb the Joads descended, old Henry Fonda in Grapes of Wrath. See—a movie just for a novel, and filmed here. This place is rich—it’s Hollywood’s backyard. So many people over the mountain don’t care about origins of film. They just want to be in something cutting edge—fast-moving high tech effects. Where’s my overalls and bare feet? That’s what I need. A Japanese beetle hit the windshield as we passed some groves. Metallic green and golden, its legs twitched before the wind finally whipped it into the valley, end over steely end.
12:11 pm Highway 14 Desert Movies
Highway 14 is one of those desert highways where RVs and tanker trucks drive slowly along the Sierra’s Mojave edge. As they move across a shrub-covered horizon, cars bunch up behind them, which is just enough annoyance to cause the occasional driver to bravely pass into oncoming traffic. That’s us. But we don’t realize we’re close to death, do we? We skip heading straight into California City and decide to make a ten-mile journey out of our way to Red Rock Canyon. It’s a quick tour into one of the sacred beating hearts of the film industry. Here, still in the same county as Bakersfield, but just outside of the valley, giant bugs attacked starship troopers, Natives fought battle after battle in the Hollywood rugged West against lonesome Homesteaders, and cavalry charged up desert hills; cowboys with parched lips got lost in the desert, Capricorn One astronauts hid out and ate snakes; and not to forget, Boris Karloff as a mummy made such a desert canyon an Egyptian land of mystery. I'm looking forward to tonight already. Can you tell?
03:33 pm Touching the Lips of M****
M**** has the best lips of anyone I know. They’re full, but not fake; kissable, deliciously so. You look into her chocolate brown eyes and find your senses pulled to those lips, so lipsticky, so moist, with intelligent words dripping out, always looking for the mysterious, always memorizing, tantalizing. She works her movie-made magic like no other. Of course there is this eternal problem. When she does a reading in front of a director, she clams, those full lips straighten; she loses her grip on her senses she had just mastered moments before for days on end. To lose it so fast; she said recently, “I do it time and again. It’s why the great movies aren’t mine. Sure I’m a leading lady type—if the Hollywood moguls would look at me that way. But once you reach a certain age without that one great film under your belt, it all slips away.” It does, like the eroded canyons I saw earlier. The red rocks like rosy cheeks. But then, they’re in great films; just a backdrop anymore.California City is a whirlwind to pass through, a dust devil of a town. But Hollywood’s here. You can see the fingerprints on every corner, in the settled desert dust, the hamburger joint windows full of grease, and the sound studio. The people here all talk of the last movie as if it were filmed yesterday, and expect more to come. It’s an endless cycle. They do come. We’re here aren’t we? I’m going to a meeting. We’re going to do some planning. ¶ 3:30 AM
