OUR COMMON HOME – HEATHER KING

THE SRIRACHA SAUCE EMPIRE

November 19, 2019
by Heather King

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Sriracha sauce is a crown jewel of Southern California foodie culture.

You’ve seen the plastic bottles. They’re filled with bright red sauce, emblazoned with a rooster, stamped with text in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Chinese, and topped by a green squirt cap. For many, this blazing hot chili product is a staple condiment.

Enter David Tran, CEO and founder of Huy Fong Foods. In 1979, Tran fled communist Vietnam on a Taiwanese freighter named Huey Fong. “I didn’t have a plan,” he says. He came to the U.S. because we were the only place that would have him. He ended up naming his Sriracha empire after that boat.

He washed up in the LA area and decided to try his hand at hot sauce.

He was born in 1945, the Year of the Rooster. So he bought a blue Chevy van, stenciled his own rooster logo on the side, and drove his first bottles to Asian restaurants and markets around town.

Over time he grew his company from a 5,000-square-foot facility in Chinatown (1980), to a 68,000-square-foot facility in Rosemead (1987), to its current state-of-the-art 650,000-square-foot compound in Irwindale (2010).

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

A FIELD TRIP TO HEARST CASTLE

November 4, 2019
by Heather King

A FIELD TRIP TO HEARST CASTLE

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins:

Every good Californian knows of Hearst Castle, the ginormous house on an enchanted Central Coast hill built by publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst.

The estate at its height consisted of 250,000 acres, bought at 70 cents per. The property featured its own airfield, a mile-long pergola planted with fruits, vines, and espaliered trees, and a private zoo that was at the time the largest in the world.

A couple of weeks ago I traveled north, boarded the bus at the Visitor’s Center, and gawked for the 5-mile-long trip up the driveway. I was there for the special Art of San Simeon Tour, which costs a hundred bucks, has an eight-person max, and lasts 2 hours, 15 minutes.

We started at the 104-foot-long Neptune Pool, the third incarnation of this luxe water-frolicking venue (Hearst, who as a child asked his mother to buy him the Louvre, changed his mind often). We learned of the Vermont marble, the Roman Empire-era columns, the statues that are a mixture of the ancient and the modern.

Next stop was the eight-bedroom Spanish-Moorish “Casa del Sol”…

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

PROJECTS AND PLOWSHARES

October 31, 2019November 4, 2019
by Heather King

I haven’t much checked in as of late. This is in large part because I have many PROJECTS.

One: I am making a will! That’s right: getting “my affairs” in order, a task upon which I’ve been procrastinating for probably five years. So the ball is rolling. That feels good. It’s a lot of work.

Like just imagine someone having to come into your home or apartment once you croak and start having to try to figure things out. How do you get into her laptop? Where’s her checking account? What about cell phone, wifi, electricity, title to car, pandora, Medicare? WHAT DO WE DO WITH ALL HER TCOTCHKES? I mean that’s just one small facet. And I don’t even own a piece of real estate!

Two: I’m updating my website/blog. Oh my God. Don’t get me started. WordPress. Even though I’ve hired someone, this has required hours and untold hours and the thing is not even remotely near to up and running. However, as my friend Geoff said, “We’ll do this in stages.” Geoff is a person of few words, which is perfect for someone like me, who will prattle endlessly and mindlessly on unless checked. Anyway, so there’s that.

GORDON PARKS: THE FLÁVIO STORY AT THE GETTY

October 19, 2019October 19, 2019
by Heather King

“Flávio da Silva,” Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1961, by Gordon Parks.
(© The Gordon Parks Foundation/J. Paul Getty Museum)

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Through Nov. 10 at the Getty is a compelling exhibit based on the work of Gordon Parks, a Renaissance-man film director, writer, and photojournalist perhaps best known for his work for LIFE magazine.

President John F. Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress,” launched in 1961, was an initiative designed to promote democracy and economic cooperation across Latin America and to forestall the spread of communism.

In March of that year, LIFE sent Parks to Rio de Janeiro with the assignment to document the country’s poverty.

At the time, the city’s more than 200 garbage-strewn favelas — hillside slum towns — were home to an estimated 700,000 people. The average per capita income was $289. Parks, a Kentucky native, had grown up poor himself, but had never seen destitution of such a degree and kind.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THE ANCIENT BRISTLECONE PINE FOREST

October 6, 2019
by Heather King

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

I spent mid-August to mid-September at a writer’s residency offered by the good sisters at the Monastery of St. Gertrude in Cottonwood, Idaho, population 923.

It was good to get away. But it also felt really, really good to be heading back to Southern California in my trusty Fiat 500.

En route, down through Boise, then 250 miles of breathtaking desert vistas to Winnemucca, Nevada, then hundreds of more miles the next morning, I made my way to a place I’ve wanted to visit for many years: the Ancient Bristlecone Forest in the Eastern Sierras.

Navigating there required several deserted back roads, the loss of all cell reception, and a 23-mile drive through the eastern portion of CA-168 W to White Mountain Road in what is technically Bishop, at which point there’s still 10-miles more of Inyo National Forest road to go, up, up, and up some more.

I’d already driven close to six hours that day, so I was especially grateful to wheel into the parking lot of the Schulman Grove Visitor’s Center. (Edmund Schulman, Ph.D., 1908-1958, was a University of Arizona dendrochronologist with a background in astronomy who, entirely sensibly to my mind, related cosmic events to the science of tree-ring dating).

At 10,000 feet the warmth of the sun was overlain with the faint chill of early fall and the fresh, dreamy scent of pine.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

FEMINISM IS IN TROUBLE

September 19, 2019September 22, 2019
by Heather King

WHITE MOUNTAIN ROAD, BISHOP CA
EASTERN SIERRAS/THE ANCIENT BRISTLECONE PINE FOREST.
I STOPPED HERE ON THE WAY BACK TO LA.

It’s not in trouble here. I have hit the ground running upon returning from my month in Idaho and week-long road trip on either end, have fallen in love with LA all over again, and am obsessed with migrating (eventually) to a new website. The light in September! Every day I am torn, and from about three pm on, would easily simply sit on my balcony and drink it all in till the sun goes down.

VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL

August 29, 2019September 17, 2019
by Heather King

GRAFFITI ADORNS A WALL IN THE GHOST CITY OF PRIPYAT NEAR THE
FOURTH NUCLEAR REACTOR (BACKGROUND) AT THE FORMER CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR POWER PLANT, SITE OF THE WORLD’S WORST NUCLEAR DISASTER. (SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/GETTY
IMAGES)

In this month of the anniversary of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

MONOLOGUE ABOUT A SONG WITHOUT WORDS

“I’ll get down on my knees to beg you—please, find our Anna Sushko. She lived in our village. In Kozhushki. Her name is Anna Sushko. I’ll tell you how she looked, and you’ll type it up. She has a hump, and she was mute from birth. She lived by herself. She was sixty. During the time of the transfer they put her in an ambulance and drove her off somewhere. She never learned how to read, so we never got any letters from her. The lonely and the sick were put in special places. They hid them. But no one knows where. Write this down . . .

The whole village took care of her, like she was a little girl. Someone would chop wood for her, someone else would bring milk. Someone would sit in the house with her for an evening, heat the stove. Two years we all lived in other places, then we came back to our houses. Tell her that her house is still there.

The roof is still there, the windows. Everything that’s broken or been stolen, we can fix. If you just tell us her address, where she’s living and suffering, we’ll go there and bring her back. So that she won’t die of sorrow. I beg you. An innocent spirit is suffering among strangers.

There’s one other thing about her, I forgot. When some thing hurts, she sings this song. There aren’t any words, it’s just her voice. She can’t talk. When something hurts, she just sings: A-a-a. It makes you feel sad.”

–Svetlana Alexievich. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Alexievich won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, “for her polyphonic Writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

August 6, 2019September 16, 2019
by Heather King

THE CARSON CITY NUGGET CASINO
I THOUGHT OF GOING IN AND ASKING IF I COULD JUST ORDER
A DIET COKE, THEN SIT AND SCOPE THE PLACE OUT,
BUT THE WHOLE GAMBLING SCENE CREEEEEEPS ME OUT.
PLUS IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL OUTSIDE,
THE MOUNTAINS AND SKY!

Per usual, life has been moving at a faster clip than I’m able to keep up with.

I do know this: I’m in Carson City, Nevada. That’s right. Holed up in the Forest Room of the Bliss Bungalow: “a charming inn for the discerning traveler.”

Well, the first part is right.

Carson City, the Historic District anyway, is totally cool–who knew? Bungalows of wood, stone and brick, shade trees, coffee shops, art galleries. (Plus of course the Nugget).

I’m en route to St. Gertrude’s Monastery in Cottonwood, Idaho, where I’m to spend a month as an artist-in-residence. (An, not the: apparently there’s to be another writer or artist, so that will be nice). For reasons I won’t go into except that they have to do with the fact that I decided not to drive 500 or 600 miles a day, which I have done before on other road trips, I thought I would space this one out a bit.

Also, I planned the whole trip basically in the middle of the night on my phone while lying in bed. Which I realize now doesn’t really show a full picture of the whole map thing.

COMPASSIONATE SOLIDARITY

July 25, 2019October 12, 2019
by Heather King

COMPASSIONATE SOLIDARITY

When we think about the people who have given us hope and have increased the strength of our soul, we might discover that they were not advice givers, warners, or moralists, but the few who were able to articulate in words and actions the human condition in which we participate and who encouraged us to face the realities of life. . . . Those who do not run away from our pains but touch them with compassion bring healing and new strength. The paradox indeed is that the beginning of healing is in the solidarity with the pain. In our solution-oriented society it is more important than ever to realize that wanting to alleviate pain without sharing it is like wanting to save a child from a burning house without the risk of being hurt. It is in solitude that this compassionate solidarity takes its shape.

–Henri J. Nouwen
henrinouwen.org

ECHO PARK’S LOTUS POND

July 6, 2019October 12, 2019
by Heather King

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins:

Echo Park, the LA neighborhood hard by downtown, boasts the largest lotus stand in the western United States.

The lake where the lotuses live began as a man-made reservoir back in 1868. A surrounding park and boathouse were completed by 1895. By 1907, more green space had been added by extending the park south to Temple and north to Bellevue.

The lotuses bloom each summer, usually peaking in early July.

And they’re surrounded by mystery, intrigue, and crime.

For starters, nobody really knows where the original flowers came from. One legend, never proven, holds that Angelus Temple missionaries, followers of Aimee Semple McPherson, brought the seeds back from China.

An 1889 LA Times article mentions that a J.C. Harvey planned to donate some Egyptian lotuses from the Nile to area parks, but the Echo Park flowers are not Egyptian lotuses, nor are they water lilies.

Instead, says landscape architect and certified arborist Michael O’Brien, “Nelumbo nucifera is native to South Asia to Australia and is grown in tropical climates around the world. As to where these plants came from, the source is lost in the mists of time.”

Though the exact date is unknown, the lotuses by all accounts first appeared in the lake during the 1920s. At the time, water gardens had become au courant citywide. So had Egyptology, exotic locales, and a vague Eastern-philosophy aesthetic.

A 1929 LA Times photo caption reads, “Right now the beds of lotus lilies in Echo Park, Los Angeles, are coming into perfection. These are the sacred lilies of India, symbols of immortality, and to the Hindu mind the most perfect of all flowers.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

Category: OUR COMMON HOME

A FIELD TRIP TO HEARST CASTLE