Andrew Culver’s Weblog

Note: My mom told me to make this list.

Tony Bennett – What a talent. What charm!

Juan Garcia Esquivel – His music is playful, elegant, danceable, creative, and endlessly zany.

Los Angeles History – Endless source of fascination. It is a city that has had countless personalities -Old West outpost, lawless frontier town, film industry boomtown, bread basket of the world, crowded modern megalopolis, perverse mirror of a fractured modern America, source of modern-day mythology (Mulholland-Prometheus; movie stars-Greek Gods). A city that will interest me constantly in its endless rebirths and reincarnations.

Carrots

Walt Whitman – I have sometimes thought that I wouldn’t mind being in prison if I had a copy of Leaves of Grass. One feels that one has never completely seen all that Whitman has to offer. There is always more between the lines, more left unsaid.

Watching Chinatown – It is a perfect movie, and tells a story that cannot be forgotten. Every time I watch it there is something new and interesting to be meditated upon.

Celery

Buster Keaton – The Great Stone-Face. As Roger Ebert puts it, it’s not that Keaton doesn’t care if we like him, it’s that he is too proud to ask for love. He faces every obstacle with a calm determination, no matter how absurd or chaotic the situation. This is in contrast to the hammy Chaplin, who is constantly asking us to feel sorry for his poor tramp.

Avocados

Black people on the bus – I could listen to their conversations forever and never cease to be entertained. People who have never ridden the bus in LA will not understand this.

Peas

Taco Trucks – In LA these trucks provide the best Mexican food available. The meat is always juicy, tender and full of flavor, and the sauces are spicy, herby and pungent.

Vito’s Pizza on La Cienega – I don’t know what is better- the pizza or Vito himself, who is a large Italian guy from New York and talks so loudly that you can always hear his stories no matter where you are in the restaurant. The pizza is like a work of art. You get the feeling that he spends a lot of time making each pizza.

Potatoes

Walking up Robertson Boulevard and seeing paparazzi outside the Ivy, waiting for stars to show up – This is always an entertaining and bizarre thing to witness.

Casablanca – Another perfect movie that withstands countless watchings. The story, which is perfectly crafted, and the acting, which is rendered with subtlty and humanity, provide new things to think about each time I watch it.

Robert Frost’s poem “Directive.”- This poem is a difficult yet rewarding work, and probably the best thing he ever wrote. It is at once a challenge and a warning to his readers, as well as a generous offer of salvation.

Peas

Raymond Chandler – I want to live in his Los Angeles, a mysterious, misty and dangerous place that probably never really existed. Menace and strange beauty coexist effortlessly in his books. The thing that amazes me is that Chandler probably invented this mythical modern metropolis out of his own imagination, before retiring to La Jolla to live out the rest of his life. Maybe he couldn’t take the fact that the LA he had invented was so different than the one he was actually living in.