LACMA Members Magazine, November/December 2008, "Hearst the Collector."

"What do you call this kind of taste?" Bianca asked as we toured the exhibition which was, as the title implied, full of things William Randolph Hearst had collected in addition to newspapers.  He had added the Boston American and the Los Angeles Examiner to his media empire in 1904.

A little heavy on the ostentatious, I thought, but I have yet to visit San Simeon.  Suits of armor, ancestral portraits of men and ladies in lace collars, Gobelin tapestries, reliquaries.  "Robber baron?"  I replied tentatively.

Bianca liked that.  "When we were kids," she said, "we got inside the beach house he built for Marion Davies, the one in Santa Monica, before they tore it down."

In the exhibition there were blown-up photographs of the opulent interiors of said vanished mansion.  "It didn't look like that when I was there," she said a little sadly.

Yesterday Eduardo and I were back at the gym, doing cardio.  "Times are bad," I said, nudging him so he'd look at the television suspended from the ceiling as a fleeting message of dire news crawled by on CNN.  "People get scared."

He seemed distracted.  "People are selling their body parts for money," I announced to get his attention.

"That is not true," he answered firmly. 

Sperm, blood, hair, I was driven to clarify, which was considerably less impressive than kidneys or eyes or livers, so he was right but not technically.  "And their gold teeth," I added for shock value.  He scoffed.

Then I told him about the Gifts for Guns exchange the LAPD does every year at this time.  People turn in their weapons and get store coupons.  This year was their biggest haul ever.  In the past people took the gift cards for BestBuy or Target.  This year they all wanted the grocery store cards.  Guns for Food.

"For a regular gun you get a hundred dollars worth of groceries," I explained.  "For assault weapons you get double coupons.  Someone even turned in a hand grenade."

"Where would you get a hand grenade?"

I had no idea.  "Which would you rather have," I asked.  "A hundred dollars worth of groceries or a hand grenade?"

Neither of us could immediately decide.

They had collected over a thousand weapons at last report.  "Curiously, I don't feel a lot safer," I confessed.

"We had major drama where I live," Eduardo said.  A woman in his building started screaming and wouldn't stop.  She'd been drinking all night, and the mean neighbors who live next door had called the police.  Then the paramedics came but she still kept screaming.  There was now a big crowd of police and paramedics inside the apartment, along with the lady and her husband.  They could not get the gurney in so they had to carry her out..  One paramedic had her arms and another had her legs.  Twisting and flapping like a giant fish out of water, Eduardo explained.  He and his neighbor Bucko from New Zealand had come out to smoke cigarettes and watch at a polite distance as they strapped her down, still screaming, and took her away.

Times are hard, I reiterated, seeing this as more proof.  People get scared and start drinking and can't stop screaming.  "What did you do then?" I asked.

"Put it in my book," he replied.  He is working on his next novel.  I had to admit, it sounded like it would make a senstional scene for the right character.  As E.M. Forster once wrote: 

"Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.  LIve in fragments no longer."