How to Make Yourself Smarter

In an age of bland evil and dumbed-down everything, how to inflame your shriveled brain?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

It was somewhere between the second and third glasses of wine and just after finishing the rice pasta but before I reached for the vegan chocolate-covered pretzels (Rainbow Grocery, 8 bucks a pound, incredible) for dessert that I happened to glance up at the TV and felt it, a massive, dull stabbing hammerblow of pain way, way back in the subcorteal nerve, where it bends and weaves and reaches down to meet the soul.

Something snapped. Something gave way. I think my head actually snapped back. I blinked a few times, shook my head, looked around to check my surroundings to see if the world was still on its proper axis because it was a feeling, a rather startling sensation that I was just hit in the face with a giant mallet made of sponge cake and road tar and death. You know it too? Sure you do.

What was on TV, exactly? Doesn’t matter. I think it was an interstitial ad for that channel’s upcoming slate of shows, a typical snappy voice-over wrap-up of sitcoms and reality-show dribble, nothing really unusual in its tone and pitch and loud garish inanity, but somehow it sounded, if you blocked out the actual words, exactly like something that would make a small monkey hit itself in the face with a brick, intentionally.

But while the cause of my sudden pain was surely the waves of malicious dumbness coming straight at my head from the TV like some sort of brain tumor on rails, what happened next was broader, and deeper.

I experienced, through some deliciously odd confluence of wine and chocolate and TV inanity and primed mental wiring, one of those rare moments of perfect lucidity wherein you see exactly what sort of tepid, low-vibrational information is being fired at you from the dumb machine gun of the culture at large. It was, indeed, a peek behind the matrix.

I do not mean to say I merely noticed, for the umpteenth time, how dumb television can be. This was more like a deep slap to the id, a wake-up call from Jesus’ long-lost half-brother Rod, the one who loves sex and reads poetry naked and eats meat with his fingers and likes to snap your cosmic ass with the giant rubber band of you-are-being-calmly-duped-and-get-the-hell-on-with-it-already.

It was, of course, a cry for help. It was my brain leaping out of the fog of casual pop culture drizzle and saying, Hey, is it not time to, you know, get a little more serious? Reacquaint yourself with some hot swatches of substance? Tip the scales of intellectual lust back from blandly passive to deliciously active?

I think I might have actually said — to myself, to the room at large, to Rod — Why yes, yes it is.

I had a professor back in my early college years in L.A., long before I headed up to Berkeley and had my brain scrambled by concentrated doses of politics and poetry and raging academia, a teacher named Farrel Broslawsky, a hilariously wry and sardonic, warm-hearted chain-smoking history buff who was my first and best mentor.

It was Farrel who first urged me to write, who got me into philosophy and politics and who taught me of the deeper mysteries of women, who gave me much invaluable, vodka-fueled insight into art and Sartre and Marx and life and who essentially mandated that I subscribe to the New York Review of Books because it was simply essential manna for a richer intellectual life.

Farrel was one of those fantastic teachers who taught every class the same way — an extended, rambling riff on life and sex and literature and how it’s all one big cosmic joke anyway. He was brilliant and funny and effortlessly ideologically subversive, and I loved him dearly.

One day before summer break I remember Farrel told me, over yet another cocktail and a Marlboro (he also taught me how to appreciate a good martini at noon on a Tuesday, God bless him), that he had chosen his summer reading. I expected the usual: some sort of smart Jewish lit (he loved Primo Levi), maybe some poetry, the latest Harper’s anthology. Hell, this was the guy who assigned me “The Brothers Karamazov” as my summer reading. I knew he wasn’t exactly normal.

But his choice was none of those. He said he’d decided to re-read Shakespeare. All of it. Every single play, including the obscure and annoying ones. It had been years since he’d read them all in one good dose, he said, and they were nothing but the purest sort of food for the soul. Besides, an average Shakespeare play only requires a few concentrated hours (or a few unconcentrated days) to get through, so the complete set could easily be imbibed over a single hot, smoggy L.A. summer.

It wasn’t something you heard every day. After all, summer is about laziness, right? About vacation and mental breaks and relaxing in the smoldering sun and doing as little as possible, about exactly not working the brain into fits of torqued language, morality, deep philosophical contortions. In other words, who the hell reads Shakespeare over the summer? And enjoys it?

This, I realized, is exactly the perspective that’s programmed into us like fluffy teddy bears of doom. This is the message from the culture at large: Do as little as possible, think even less, and if you really want deeper smarts you’re probably an elitist liberal and you gotta work for it and seek it out because it’s buried under countless layers of ideological effluvia and celebrity shrapnel and rank, mealy piles of Bush.

Farrel’s reasons for his choice were obvious but still illuminating: He did it because he truly loved language. He did it because once you get past the idea that such a project is somehow difficult (it isn’t), you see that many of the bard’s plays are the best sort of melodramatic, death-crazed, sex-obsessed page-turner anyway.

And most of all, he did it because, simply put, you come out the other end of a reading experience like that as if your id had been put through a car wash run by demented genius angels. You are revitalized, inspired, born anew. It simply doesn’t get much better than that.

It was a profound lesson. In one fell swoop, that afternoon chat reversed my thinking for good. No longer was it: Why the hell would you want to spend your summer doing something like that? To: How could you not want to do something like that?

I do not know, exactly, how I intend to draw out this particular lesson, or the reminder of it I experienced that weird night in front of the TV. I only know that if you’re not careful, such invaluable glimpses become increasingly rare, the reminders begin to dim and the mind turns to whiny paste and the heart grows cold.

I do have one idea, though. It involves a great deal of Shakespeare and the long, lucid days of this upcoming summer. And oh yes, at least one very good martini.

Fun Game #1: how much cheese can you put into the baked potato and still be able to close it?

Apparently, quite a bit, particularly if it’s pre-shredded. This is akin to the Fun Holiday Game: how much butter and cream can you put into the mashed potatoes while still maintaining their essential potato-ness? Also practiced tonight was: How much of the kitchen can you dye Rubine while cutting up cooked beets? 

Good times, I tell you. Takes vegetables to a whole new level.

I’d intended to be heading to sleep by now, but there’s Heavy Rain with the Exciting Accompaniment of Thunder and Lightning. It’s beautiful and entertaining and is worth staying up to admire.  

1. See more movies in movie theaters. I rent plenty (thanks, Netflix!), but there’s something lost in the translation (scenery isn’t the same on a laptop) and if the movie is serious or action-packed, my attention can wander. So, theaters! the Big Screen Experience, please!

2. Bring lunch to work. And good lunches, not just peanut butter. This will save money, improve my health and lead to …

3. Eating more vegetables. I like them fine, but I have to plan to cook them. I’m not so big on the meal planning. This is also where the organic bi-monthly deliveries help out as variety = spice and all of that. Plus, if I’ve already paid for the food, I’m more inclined to use it.

4. Get Out! I plan a lot of trips, but weekends here, I tend to hang around the house a little too much.

We’ll see how these work out 

Things I did:

ate my vegetables

partied Turk-Mex style

bought stuff

heard from Cassie (yay!)

saw art

renewed my passport

watched movies

made cupcakes (turned out badly because I tinkered with the recipe)

made cake (turned out well because I tinkered with the recipe)

had a honey-vanilla latte at Urth (too sweet, but good crema)

gave up on “The L Word”

napped

Things I didn’t do:

taxes

any more laundry than absolutely necessary

burn CD’s for Bills or Kelly or Stacy

clean my room

finish my book

spend any holiday gift cards (I did wander the stores for awhile)

update craft projects (although I keep thinking about trying to knit something again)

see Pan’s Labyrinth

we were just here on Saturday - what excellent news … I think that I want to be the second person to ride it. 

Six years after it was closed following a fatal crash, downtown L.A.’s landmark railway is slated to reopen.

By Cara Mia DiMassa, Times Staff Writer
January 24, 2007

When Angels Flight, the L.A. landmark dubbed “the shortest railway in the world,” closed in 2001 after a fatal crash, many wondered whether it was gone for good.

Officials announced Tuesday that the funicular will reopen this summer — but Angels Flight will return to a decidedly different downtown Los Angeles.

In the six years during which Angels Flight has been out of operation, downtown has seen a remarkable residential transformation. Luxury lofts and high-rise condos have sprung up nearby, adding thousands of people to downtown’s residential population and changing downtown’s profile from a sleepy city center into a much more vibrant, hip neighborhood.

With the massive Grand Avenue project about to break ground atop Bunker Hill, there is a growing feeling that the new Angels Flight will actually serve as a valued form of transportation downtown — not just as a tourist attraction.

It’s a strange turn of events for the fabled railway, which has served as both an icon for L.A.’s sense of daring and its long neglect of its city core.

In many ways, the two rail cars that climb up Bunker Hill — known as Olivet and Sinai — would barely recognize their old haunts.

Cultural institutions, including the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, have opened their doors, and the Colburn School is in the midst of a major expansion. A Ralphs market will open in June — the area’s first supermarket in half a century. And other amenities, including new restaurants and bars, are mixed in throughout the corridor.

At a news conference Tuesday, officials showed off the refurbished railroad and announced that they were about to begin the third phase of the railway’s $2.6-million restoration, which will include installation of a new drive system and safety improvements. They also expressed excitement that as new developments, including the nearby Grand Avenue project, reach completion, Angels Flight might actually be used again for commuting.

“Angels Flight was an interesting part of downtown,” said John Welborne, president of Angels Flight Railway Foundation, which took over the railroad after the 2001 accident and has raised funds for its restoration. “Even more so now.”

The development boom has an ironic twist for Angels Flight.

The rail line was designed to connect downtown with the once-bustling residential community on Bunker Hill. But when the city leveled that neighborhood as part of a 1960s redevelopment push, Angels Flight was left moribund.

The funicular closed at the end of that decade. It was revived in 1996 after years of efforts by preservationists.

The railway — then as now — plays an important role: connecting the historic downtown core along Broadway, Spring and Hill streets with the newer office towers, condos and cultural centers on Bunker Hill.

Marie Condron, a seven-year downtown resident who founded a popular neighborhood Internet bulletin board, said many residents who live in the historic core would frequent Bunker Hill if there were an easier way to get there. Right now, it involves hiking up several streets that are not exactly pedestrian-friendly.

“Most downtown residents are rooting for any of the bells and whistles that would make it more of a functioning neighborhood,” she said.

In many ways, the downtown that Angels Flight will return to is more similar to the one it was originally built to serve in 1901, when Col. J.W. Eddy built the funicular as a way to spare Angelenos the walk up Bunker Hill — for the price of one cent a ride. At the time, Victorian mansions lined the double-barreled railroad’s tracks, and an observation tower at the top offered residents a view all the way to Boyle Heights.

These days, the area is ringed by different sorts of residences. The recently opened Metro 417 building, once the Subway Terminal building, offers upscale lofts starting at $1,400 a month. The Douglas and Pan-American buildings, a few blocks away, offer condo-style loft units. Farther east, the Historic District includes a handful of old bank buildings that have been revamped as housing. The projects join the Angelus Plaza Senior Citizens Housing Complex, opened in the 1980s, as well as several residential towers on Bunker Hill.

George Takei, a member of the Angels Flight Railway Foundation board who is perhaps best known as “Star Trek’s” Sulu, was at the news conference Tuesday. He remembered riding the funicular as a young child, when he visited downtown with his mother, and said he was glad to see downtown’s renaissance linked to the funicular’s resurrection.

“What is going on is that people get downtown,” Takei said. “They want the 24-hour lifestyle.”

A key piece of that lifestyle, he said, is transportation. “For the city to work, we need transportation to tie it together.”

As he spoke, volunteers from the Painters and Allied Trade Unions were putting the final touches on the Hill Street arch at the bottom of Bunker Hill. Officials did a spectrographic analysis to arrive at the black-and-orange color scheme that the funicular sported in the 1960s. In the previous restoration, the arch and the upper building were painted red and black.

Although Angels Flight has gotten a new paint job, much remains to be completed before its late summer opening.

Welborne said that before then, workers must replace the old drive machinery and install a number of new safety measures, including track brakes. Officials also are looking at additional safety measures, including a second cable or cable brake, designed to prevent the kind of accident that occurred in 2001. In that accident, a car broke loose and sped backward for almost a block before smashing into another rail car at the bottom of the hill, killing an 83-year-old man and injuring seven others. Federal investigators concluded that faulty mechanical and brake systems, combined with weak oversight, were to blame for the crash.

The entire system must be certified by the state Public Utilities Commission before it can be reopened, Welborne said.

so my potential second career as a baker was rudely derailed when my attempt at that bread recipe refused to leave the pot. It was particularly disappointing because it looked so beautiful

but after wading through several pages of people raving about what fantastic bread it is and how well it had turned out for them (each and every time), I think that I’ve realized where I went wrong and I’m making one more attempt.

the benefit of having something with a three-ingredients list is that the second attempt only costs you in time. OK, and apparently a little of my pride, but if the next loaf comes out, all will be forgiven.

These freak me out, particularly when they are so very like their namesake, but the light was really beautiful this morning

It’s been the theme of the weekend. I’ve never been someone who does things halfway - either I’m going to ignore it altogether or I’m going to do everything.  Christina and I had a vegan lunch, then ate our way through  5 kinds of grilled steak for dinner. I have six pillows on my bed; when I changed the sheets today, I unearthed four magazines and a paperback. I’d originally intended to bake some banana bread today, but didn’t feel like it. However, once I decided to make some dinner, I ended up making the bread (banana-chocolate chip) plus banana-cranberry-orange-muffins plus starting some of the No-Knead Bread that everyone has been raving about. 

Incidentally, I had beets for dinner, roasted, with the tops sauteed in olive oil and pepper. Something about eating them together made me feel like it was the vegetarian version of veal cooked in milk, but they were really good. Still very happy with the organic veggie deliveries.