Downtown Los Angeles, Part 2: Literary L.A.

My friend Ben is a collector – of books, movies, music, you name it. When I was in high school and college, I often went to his house instead of going to the library, because I knew I could trust that everything on his shelves was worth checking out. One day I went looking for something to read, and pulled two titles: Charles Bukowski’s Women and Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal. There was no browser-friendly blurb on the back of Bukowski’s book, so I checked the inside covers for more information. What I got was a list of the author’s other works – with titles like The Days Run Away like Wild Horses over the Hills / Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness / Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame / Love is a Dog from Hell / You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense. Bukowski was obviously a guy who wrote from the gut. I sat down, started reading, and didn’t move until I had finished the book. Then I went out and bought another one.

The same thing happened to Bukowski, while he was scanning the shelves at the Los Angeles Public Library. One day, he picked up John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust and he couldn’t put it down. Fante wrote his novels from the perspective of an alter ego named Arturo Bandini: a strong-willed Italian-American who moves from his childhood home in Boulder, Colorado to downtown Los Angeles, to become a writer. Four novels outline Bandini's life from childhood to Hollywood: Wait Until Spring, Bandini (published in 1938), The Road to Los Angeles (written before all the others, but not published until 1985), Ask the Dust (published in 1939), and Dreams of Bunker Hill (published in 1982).

Ask the Dust chronicles the aspiring writer’s “lean days of determination” in the downtown neighborhood of Bunker Hill, in the 1930s. The first chapter charts his daily routine from Angel’s Flight to Olive Street and 5th, past the Biltmore to the Central Library, where he imagines seeing his name among the “big boys” on the spine of a book. Later, he meets Camilla Lopez in a bar on nearby Spring Street, before returning home to the Alta Loma Hotel, where he looks out over the city of Los Angeles and begins to write. Fante outlines his novel as follows: “Story of a girl I once loved who loved someone else, who in turn despised her.” Sounds simple enough, right? But the voice of Arturo Bandini – an ego-maniac without the ego – makes it unforgettable.

After we went on our Broadway Theater Tour on Saturday, we roamed the neighborhood to see where Fante lived and worked. Angel’s Flight (“the world’s shortest railway”) doesn’t operate anymore, and Bunker Hill exists only in name. The neighborhood was one of the city’s first suburbs – founded in the 1880s, when the streets were lined with beautiful Victorian houses. By 1940, it had become a slum. That year, Fante wrote a memorial for his old neighborhood: “Everything changes, and for better or worse the change came for me and the years have trickled away, and Bunker Hill is only a memory. But it lives on. It gave my thought food and drink. It sated my hunger for life...”

In 1955, the city started a LONG redevelopment project (still ongoing…) to turn the neighborhood into a business district. Now, instead of Victorian houses, there are skyscrapers looming above Pershing Square. In the early 80s, around the same time that Fante wrote his last Bandini novel, Charles Bukowski and publisher City Lights introduced Ask the Dust to a new generation of readers. Today it is considered one of the best early examples of Los Angeles literature – published the same year as Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust.

Despite all the changes, there are still fans who are celebrating Fante’s legacy and what’s left of his Bunker Hill. This summer, an L.A.-based company called Esotouric started offering bus tours of Fante and Bukowski’s downtown haunts. The building where Fante wrote Ask the Dust is still there. So is the building where Bukowski wrote Women… though just barely. Both buildings, which are vacant except for transient squatters, have been slated for demolition. For information and photos, see the Esotouric founder’s blog: Two or Three Things I Know about Her.

This blog also led me to a site called “Nobody Reads in L.A.” I swear I visited the website a few days ago, but now it seems to be gone. Maybe that’s proof positive of the title’s cynical theory? Too bad, because there are plenty of great books written in and about Los Angeles. I just finished a 1928 book called Spider Boy by Carl Van Vechten, one of the first novels to skewer the Hollywood myth. I’m convinced that it was a major inspiration for Billy Wilder’s film Sunset Boulevard. Other recent discoveries: If He Hollers, Let Him Go by Chester Himes (a glimpse into WWII-era San Pedro) and Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (forerunner of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero). These are some of the best works of fiction I’ve read in years… maybe since I was in college, chasing Bukowski with other fierce-minded writers like Knut Hamsun, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Joseph Heller, William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Hubert Selby Jr., Larry Crews… My memories of reading these authors for the first time are as vivid as Fante’s memories of Bunker Hill. Put simply: They fed my hunger for life.

This is a mural near the intersection of 3rd and Broadway. The subject is actor Anthony Quinn... who I think looks a bit like Charles Bukowski.

Pershing Square - then (photo from the Los Angeles Public Library)

Pershing Square - now

Angel’s Flight - then (photo from www.yesterdayla.com)

Angel’s Flight - now

Bunker Hill steps

Los Angeles Public Library (view from the top of Bunker Hill)

Just to give you a sense of how big this library really is.... here's the stairwell to the lower levels.


Behind the modern art sculpture is the Westin-Bonaventure Hotel, recognizable from the beginning of "The Terminator." Zoom in and you can see that it has elevator shafts on the outside of the building. (View from the top of Bunker Hill)

Downtown Los Angeles, Part 1: The Broadway Theater District

Since we moved to Los Angeles, I’ve been collecting books about the city: travel guides, history books, and novels alike. It started when my brother and his wife bought me a copy of "L.A. Bizarro," a 1997 book that offers readers a voyeuristic tour of “the obscure, the absurd and the perverse” in Los Angeles – bringing casual curiosity-seekers to places that they may not want to physically visit. A fair amount of those sites are in historic downtown, where (as the authors put it) “what was once the bustling nerve center of our city is now… a crumbling, putrefied, God-forsaken wasteland.”

Anthony R. Lovett and Matt Maranian approach most of their downtown destinations with a mix of admiration and revulsion. Take, for example, their description of Clifton’s Cafeteria, one of the original theme restaurants: “The Clifton’s décor looks like the kind of hallucination a glue sniffer might have if he used pine-scented air freshener instead of model airplane cement. The main wall inside Clifton’s stretches two stories high and is painted floor to ceiling to look like a forest clearing complete with cedar tree trunk relief and an illumined full moon… If you’re thinking of ending your life, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more beautifully macabre setting than in Clifton’s.” Don’t even get them started on the food.

The only overwhelmingly complimentary entry in the entire book is a four-page spread for the Los Angeles Conservancy Walking Tours. For years, the Conservancy has been dedicated to preserving the architectural history of downtown Los Angeles, and every Saturday they offer tours of the city’s forgotten center. The most popular tour is one that focuses on the old theater district, a seven-block section of Broadway (between Third Street and Olympic Boulevard) that became home to a dozen major theaters between 1910 and 1931. In the late 1920s, a new theater district popped up on Hollywood Boulevard (now L.A.’s most notorious tourist trap), but the downtown theater district remained relatively popular until the 1960s, when theaters in Westwood began to draw the crowds away. Most of the Broadway theaters continued to operate as grindhouses through the 1980s. In 1997, when “L.A. Bizarro” went to press, only three of the original theaters were open to the public. Ten years later, none of them are operating as movie houses. The best way to see those historic theaters today is to take the Conservancy tour.

SO at 10AM on Saturday, we arrived at The Million Dollar Theater on the corner of Broadway and 3rd Street, to get started. The Million Dollar Theater was commissioned by Sid Grauman, who later built the famous Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, in 1918. The MDT was designed in a Spanish Baroque style characterized by extreme decorative detailing, especially over doorways. The interior is equally striking, partly because of elaborate details on the ceiling and walls (there are two huge terra-cotta sculptures, on either side of the stage, that incorporate the skulls of dead animals) and partly because of the steepness of the seating arrangement. Not knowing much about architecture, the place seemed vaguely medieval to me. With all the warm colors, it even made me think of Dante’s Inferno.

Across the street, we made an unofficial stop at another distopian setting: The Bradbury. The Bradbury is the oldest commercial building in Los Angeles. Built in 1893, it was designed by a man who took his inspiration from a novel about a utopian community in the year 2000. The novel – Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” – describes the average commercial building in the community as a "vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above ... The walls and ceiling were frescoed in mellow tints, calculated to soften without absorbing the light which flooded the interior." Film geeks know that the Bradbury was not a “vast hall of light” when it appeared as J.F. Sebastian’s home in Ridley Scott’s film “Blade Runner,” which is set in 2019 Los Angeles. In "Blade Runner," it’s always night. (I guess the smog finally eclipsed the sun???) For more photos, see this website. For comparisons to screen shots from "Blade Runner," go here.

Afterwards, we headed south down Broadway. Lovett and Maranian have written a more vivid description of this section of town than I could come up with, so I’ll let them set the scene: “Trekking through the dense and chaotic street scene of downtown Los Angeles on a Saturday is an experience unto itself. The noise level alone is enough to make a reasonably sane person tear off all their clothes and run screaming down the middle of Broadway; the oppressive din from the abundance of audio-video stores and mega-arcades is matched only by the barkers in front of jewelry shops and the pushy street vendors peddling everything from Selina T-shirts and electroplated gold chains, to live turtles and home-grown produce. On virtually every street corner is stationed a toothless wheelchair-bound religious zealot screaming passages from the Bible, as well as non-religious zealots who stand on the street corners screaming simply because they just have a lot to say to the world. A multitude of languages are spoken here, and fortunately English isn’t one of them; that the cacophony of Broadway is indistinguishable is its only saving grace.”

We saw and heard (and smelled) all of the things that one expects in downtown L.A., but it was all fairly subdued this weekend, perhaps due to an overwhelming police presence. Bike cops were out in droves, preparing for an immigration protest march. Police presence or no, I’m going to give the merchants and residents of Broadway the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they are never quite as forbidding as the stories usually suggest. (While writing this post, I ran across a blog that tirelessly laments the current condition of nearby Pershing Square… but, while it had more than its fair share of homeless people asleep on the benches, it still seemed quite safe and was a beautiful bit of greenery in the midst of the asphalt jungle.) When we arrived at a block of theaters between 5th and 6th Street, business owners happily let us inside to see the remains of The Roxie, Clune’s Broadway Cameo, and Pantages Arcade – three theaters that now exist only as storefronts and storage spaces.

The Roxie was one of the last theaters built on Broadway, and it’s not nearly as opulent as some of the other theaters. In fact, it looks more like the movie theaters that modern audiences are accustomed to – box-shaped rather than bowl-shaped, a very gradual incline from front to back, minimal decoration, and…. air conditioning. Well, sort of. There are holes in the floor, just inside of the main walkway, to allow for the flow of air from an underground storage space. Somehow, it works to keep the space relatively cool. The theater also has a “crying room” next to the projection booth – where mothers with babies could watch the show. Now, there’s something that I wish modern theaters had. Next door, Clunes is equally simple. Built in 1910, it was the oldest continuously operating movie theater in the state until 1991, when the lobby was converted into an electronics store.

On the next block, we stopped outside the Los Angeles Theater and the Orpheum Palace. The Los Angeles allegedly boasts the most elaborate interior of all the Broadway theaters, decorated in the French Baroque style. Our tour guide said that even the bathrooms are a sight to behold – each stall is made from a different color marble! The Los Angeles is frequently used for filming, and was the site of two screenings for this year’s annual “last remaining seats” film festival, run by the Conservancy. The marquee is still promoting the revival of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t open for the Saturday morning tour… so I had to turn to the theater’s website to get a look inside.

Across the street, the Orpheum Palace was also locked up (once again, I had to go to the theater’s website to find interior photos), though the exterior was in better shape than it has been in years. Just last week, the front façade was power-washed for the first time since the building was constructed in 1911 – revealing lively colors that have been covered with dust and grime for the better part of the century. The Palace operated as a movie theater until 2000, and when the authors of “L.A. Bizarro” visited in 1997, they recorded a bit of controversial trivia: “The stately French and Italian influences of the 2,200 seat auditorium are eerily offset by its racially segregated balcony – a creepy feature not entirely uncommon among these early vaudeville houses. Accessible only from an entrance in the alley, this segregated section was location in the second balcony no less, offering both the worst view and the hottest, stuffiest seating to be had in the theater.”

Continuing south, we reached what was once the busiest intersection downtown – 7th and Broadway, the terminus of the fabled Route 66. Because of its location on this particular corner, Loew’s State Theater was once the area’s most profitable theater. Built in 1921 and originally owned by Marcus Loew, founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), it was supposedly the first performance venue for Judy Garland, who appeared onstage in 1929 as one of the singing Gumm Sisters. Today, The State is home to a church congregation that keeps it in good shape. Unfortunately, there was a big wedding there on Saturday morning, so we were confined to the lobby. The Morosco (also known as The Globe), on the other side of the street, has not fared as well. It is now a noisy arcade.

On the next block, between 8th and 9th Street, there are three more theaters sitting side-by-side: The Tower, The Rialto, and The Orpheum. This block is recognizable from the new “Transformers” movie – it’s where the peace-loving Autobots square off against the evil Decepticons. The block also has a much older cinematic claim to fame: Harold Lloyd hung from a clock above The Rialto in his 1923 film “Safety Last!” Not much is left of The Rialto except the name.

In 1997, The Orpheum was apparently a grim sight – “home to whatever transient sets up camp inside the tiled portico,” according to “L.A. Bizarro.” Since then, new owner Steve Needleman has undertaken a 3.5 million dollar restoration, and The Orpheum is now a popular venue for concerts. Needleman kindly met us at the door and took us inside for a tour. And the place was amazing! It’s hard to get a sense of the grandeur of the old movie palace by looking at photos… the photos on The Orpheum’s official website do a much better job than my quick snapshots.

Because the immigration protest was about to start, we had to cut our tour short and head north. A quick glance down Broadway, however, gave us a glimpse of the official theater of United Artists – the production company founded in 1919 by D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin (and recently taken over by Tom Cruise). After a brief stint as a porn house and a panaderia that made use of the theater’s auditorium and lobby as the exhaust duct for large ovens (!), the UA Theater is now a church.

The Conservancy’s walking tour program features one photo of the interior of the United Artists Theater, and makes it look like a forbidding ice world in some elaborate fantasy epic. This is obviously the kind of theater that prompts people to complain that “they don’t make ‘em like they used to.” Stepping into some of these theaters is like stepping into the world of the most imaginative Hollywood films – everything is larger than life. Although it’s a bit sad to see how far some of these historic theaters have fallen, I have to agree with our Conservancy tour guide when he says “at least they’re still there, so that we can stand inside them and imagine what it was like…”

The Los Angeles Conservancy Tour of the Broadway Theater District is only $10 per person (for non-members) and worth every penny. To make reservations, call 213-623-2489 or visit their website. If you can't visit the theaters in person, there are a number of websites featuring photo essays of the district, including GMRnet.

The Million Dollar Theater

The Million Dollar Theater - side door

The Bradbury

The Bradbury - lobby

Looking up toward Sebastian’s apartment

The Roxie - exterior

The Roxie - interior

The Palace & The Los Angeles

The State

The Tower


The Rialto (all that's left is the sign)

The Orpheum - lobby

The Orpheum - first floor

The Orpheum - balcony

United Artists in the background, riot prevention in the foreground

Southland photos

We took a short drive to the Southland this weekend, to see shooting locations from Kelly's first film "Donnie Darko" (in North Long Beach) and Gellar's star-making role as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (in Torrance).

Sunnydale High

The Buffy Summers House is three blocks north of the school. The owners were out front when we dropped by, so I had to wait to snap this photo. Some people don't understand that obsessive fans are only mildly crazy.

Next, we headed for North Long Beach, to a neighborhood that's frequently used for filming. Country Club Drive is home to Donnie Darko, his pedophile neighbor Jim Cunningham, and Ferris Bueller. One street over, you can also find several houses from the "American Pie" series.

Jim Cunningham’s house from “Donnie Darko”

Donnie Darko’s house

It turns out that Ferris Bueller lives a few doors down from Donnie Darko.

Nintendo flashback

I can’t help myself. That little clip of the “Goonies II” video game that I posted last week got me thinking about the heyday of the original Nintendo Entertainment system. To the best of my recollection, my brother and I got our first NES for Christmas 1988. I was nine years old. My family had just moved, and we were enrolled in a smaller school where we didn’t have any particularly close friends... So we spent roughly the next three years playing video games. When my family moved again, we stopped. I never graduated to Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, Xbox, etc. Whatever skills I had then have failed to evolve, and now I simply don’t have good enough reflexes for newer video games. (Which is probably for the best.) But I can still wax nostalgic through the magic of YouTube, where a younger generation of players has posted “speed runs” of those original games… making me feel slightly ridiculous about the weeks and months I spent trying to accomplish what they can accomplish in twenty minutes.

Disclaimer: It occurs to me that maybe nobody cares to hear me wax nostalgic about my geeky childhood. But, I say, what’s a blog for if not for self-indulgent rambling? Apologies in advance if I’m alienating either of my attentive readers.

Anyway, I think I can narrow down my list of most memorable games to nine more – not counting “Goonies II.” In no particular order…

Super Mario Brothers 2 (Nintendo, 1988)

This was the first game we owned. It was brand new when we got the system for Christmas, and was the subject of the first issue of Nintendo Power, which came with the system. (I’m amazed to see that Nintendo Power is still being published, though the format has changed a bit. Originally, the magazine was filled with tips and maps, to help players “beat” a certain game. Now, it looks like its mostly filled with promotional material.) Without that magazine, it might have taken us weeks to beat the evil King Wart. With the help of the magazine, we did it in a few days. The great thing about this game was that, even after we beat it, we kept playing it. It’s one of the few linear Nintendo games that never got boring. (When I say linear, I mean that the object of each level was to move from the beginning of the map to the end and, at the end, face a gatekeeper – we always called them the “boss”.) What kept SMB2 fun were the surreal landscapes and the quirky characters, which all looked and moved like cute circus freaks. At the end of the game, we found out why everything in this world was so odd: Mario dreamed the whole thing. Think of it as “Alice in Wonderland” or “The Wizard of Oz” as a video game.

Honorable mention: Adventure Island (Hudson Soft, 1988) – just as lively, but not quite as fun because of the main character’s restricted range of motion

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out (Nintendo, 1987)

This was one of the first games I bought… and, man, it stressed me out. The game puts the player in the role of a diminutive boxer, “Little Mac,” who faces off against a series of increasingly domineering opponents. It starts with a glass-jawed Parisian lightweight and progresses to the then-world champion, Mike Tyson. (When he lost the title, Nintendo reissued the game as “Punch-Out!,” with a white lookalike in the role of world champion.) The fighters were consistently amusing: there was a crazed Nazi, a Flamenco dancer, an Indian magician, a hard-drinking Russian, and a Hollywood weight-lifter. Once you learned the weakness of each fighter, the game was pretty easy… but, until you picked up on their quirks, the suspense between punches could be pretty unnerving. It took me a long time to beat Mike Tyson. His punches may look incredibly slow by today’s video game standards, but they weren’t slow at all for my 10 year old reflexes. After his defeat, Mike winks and says “I’ve never seen such finger speed before.” Today, this makes me feel a little bit dirty.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (Nintendo, 1988)

It was the epic scope of this sequel’s medieval mythology that drew me in. It had a royal family, a sleeping princess, knights and wizards aplenty, mysterious crystals and magic spells, monsters and man-beasts, and a prophecy about a Prince of Darkness who can only be reawakened by the blood of the hero. Sort of like Harry Potter. In order to sort out all of these elements, you had to explore the entire game-universe and collect information. I thoroughly studied the game’s layout in an early issue of Nintendo Power – I remember coming home from school, finding it in the mail, and reading it cover-to-cover until night fell and I was squinting to see in the dark. I didn’t even want to get up to turn on the lights. (Yes, I was just as obsessive then as I am now.) I promptly began saving money to buy the game, and I played it for weeks. Eventually, I had to buy the NES Player’s Guide so that I could figure out where to go and what to do. (Crafty marketing on the part of Nintendo Inc.) In the tradition of the great myths, the end of the game pits the player/main character against his doppelganger, a shadow version of himself. Glad to see that somebody was reading their Joseph Campbell.

Honorable mention: Kid Icarus (Nintendo, 1987) – the storytelling is more two-dimensional than in Zelda, but it’s just as “educational” on the subject of ancient mythology

Metroid (Nintendo, 1987)

It occurs to me that I was familiar with James Cameron’s “Aliens” before I ever actually saw the film. His vision permeates the world of Metroid. Like Zelda II, the format is non-linear, and follows the quest of Samus, a space-suited bounty hunter on a desolate alien planet populated by a variety of strange critters… and not one single human being. The planet is run by “Mother Brain,” a giant queen alien protected by hundreds of levitating parasites (“metroids”). When she’s defeated, our explorer sets a bomb to destroy the alien planet, then reveals his true nature. Samus is – gasp! – a woman. The quicker you beat the game, the fewer clothes Samus is wearing she… um… reveals herself. (See the YouTube speed run for something comparable to Sigourney Weaver’s attire at the end of “Alien.”) What I loved about this game was the bleak tone. The creepy minimalist music enhanced the player’s sense of isolation, and it genuinely got under my skin. Having always been a bit morbid, I never wanted to leave the world of that game. There were so many secret discoveries to be made that I spent endless hours (practically an entire summer vacation) searching for new portals and new chambers. I was convinced that I would find something that wasn’t on the maps. In some strange way, the world of that video game affected my imagination just as much as the dark planet of the “Alien” films.

Honorable mention: Blaster Master (Sunsoft, 1988) – equally dark, but hard as hell… I could never get past the third or fourth level

Contra (Konami, 1987)

As I said, my brother and I got into Nintendo games at the same time, and we only had one NES. This meant that we had to take turns playing. Contra gave us a rare opportunity to be onscreen simultaneously. Even better: the unforgettable Konami code (up up down down left right left right B A start… I remember this useless bit of information just like I remember old phone numbers and zip codes… and the number that Robert Stack used to give at the end of every episode of “Unsolved Mysteries”) gave us enough extra lives to actually beat the game. I think we got through the entire thing during our first run, but we continued to play because, hey, who doesn’t like blowing shit up? The run-and-gun style game follows a pair of guerilla soldiers to an underground bunker on a remote tropical island, where terrorists and aliens are conspiring to destroy the world. Or something. Once again, the blockbuster action-horror film “Aliens” is an obvious inspiration. I have to imagine that Contra was a common example among parents who were concerned about video game violence in the mid-80s. Thankfully, my parents never complained. Maybe because this particular game was so good at keeping me and my brother from fighting over whose turn it was.

Honorable mention: Lifeforce (Konami, 1986) – another two-player Konami game that pits the military against ugly aliens

Castlevania (Konami, 1986)

While we’re on the subject of Nintendo games inspired by horror films, I can’t leave out Castlevania. This game was a virtual who’s who of gothic movie monsters. It pits you, the heroic knight Simon Belmont, against vampire bats, ghosts, zombies, skeletons, hunchbacks, fish men, ax-wielding knights, Medusa, The Mummy, Frankenstein's Monster, The Grim Reaper and finally Count Dracula. My parents wouldn’t allow me to watch horror movies as a kid, so this was as close as I could come to seeing these creatures brought to life. Unfortunately, the Grim Reaper always kicked my ass, so I never got to square off against the Dracula… until the sequel, which was in some ways more fun than the original because of its new RPG format. At any rate, I remember watching my friend Mitch fight Dracula for the first time. When the Count turned into a giant gargoyle, he almost wet himself. The end credits were classic. Oh, and by the way: The YouTube speed run makes the Grim Reaper look pathetic. Apparently, all you have to do is throw holy water on him and he can’t move. Who knew?

Honorable mention: Friday the 13th (LJN, 1989) – okay, so it was a lame video game… but it had some pretty creepy music. Unlike in the movies, there are actually innocent children being slaughtered at Camp Crystal Lake in the video game. That’s got to be worth something, right?.... right?

Mega Man 2 (Capcom, 1989)

Here’s something that any fan of 70’s sci-fi should have loved: a bionic man pit against an imaginative world of ruthless killer robots. The gimmick with this series was that each “boss” had his own special weapon: Air Man attacks with a wind-shooter, Heat Man attacks with a flamethrower, Metal Man attacks with metal blades, Quick Man attacks with a series of boomerangs, etc. When Mega Man (that’s you) beats each boss, he takes their weapon. And each boss is particularly vulnerable to one of the other weapons. In the end of the first game, Mega Man squared off against Dr. Wily, the mad scientist who had corrupted the other robots, and in the end Wily falls to his knees crying for mercy. Mega Man, having some shred of humanity, lets him go…. time and time again, sequel after sequel. There were 7 games on the original NES, which I believe is more than any other series. Basically, it was the same thing over and over, but with different weapons. I guess the designers knew not to mess with a good thing. This was my favorite entry in the series because it was much more detailed than the first game and because, well, by the third sequel, I had a pretty strong sense of déjà vu.

My friend Bobby, over at Virtual Fools, recently wrote his own retrospective on Mega Man 2. Check it out.

Ninja Gaiden (Tecmo, 1989)

I think I was starting to run out of enthusiasm for Nintendo around the time Ninja Gaiden came out, and it sucked me back in for a while. Part of the appeal of this game was the cinematic storyboards – miniature movies placed in between each level, to chart the emotional progression of the hero as he tries to find his father’s killer. This obviously made an impression on one of my friends at the time. When I was having trouble beating the last boss, I asked him how he’d managed it, and he told me that he just imagined the guy had killed his father. That didn’t work for me. I love my father and all, but I was more of a tactical player than an emotional player. Until then, I didn’t realize that anybody was an emotional player… but I suppose that could account for the success of games like this. Films and video games have become more and more alike since then. In fact, the hand-held cinematography of some recent action-thrillers makes me feel like I’m playing a video game. I have trouble with that because, as I said earlier, my hand-eye coordination isn't what it used to be. Ninja Gaiden II (Techmo, 1990) worked for all the same reasons the first one worked. By the time Ninja Gaiden III came out in the summer of ‘91, I was pretty much done.

Final Fantasy (Square, 1990)

At some point, I got tired of Nintendo, and sold all my video games at a yard sale. It must have been at the end of summer vacation 1990. The following summer (1991), I got bored and bought another one. I remember that it came with a free game, an RPG called Dragon Warrior (Chunsoft, 1989). I didn’t think I’d like a strict role-playing game (there were no “action” scenarios in Dragon Warrior), but I didn’t have much money, so I figured I’d give it a shot. To my surprise, it captivated me the way the best video games always had – the same way a movie or a novel would pull me in, by making me forget the real world and become immersed in a completely fictional world. After that, I turned to another RPG game called Final Fantasy. This one had a much larger universe, and allowed the player to strategize each moving using different fighters, weapons, etc. It was a game that required planning, not reflexes. I remember one week, toward the end of summer, where all I did was eat and play Final Fantasy. Those were the days…. back when I could kill time like that without feeling guilty. Hell, now I feel guilty just writing this blog about it.

LIZA'S GUEST BLOG: Erie Canal Trip

In late June, I flew to New York to help my dad move his boat from the east coast to the Midwest. My dad and his brothers have been “messing around in boats” since their childhood on Long Island Sound. My brother, cousins and I have been lucky enough to continue to the tradition, whether sailing in Boston Harbor or powering on Lake Michigan. Dad’s boat is a 36’ Northern Bay, a gorgeous navy blue trawler or lobster boat, named Kairos. According to Greek mythology, Kairos was the youngest son of Zeus and known as the spirit of opportunity, or the god of the favorable moment. I.e., carpe diem, buy a boat, enjoy while you can, that sort of thing.

The plan was to head up the Hudson and motor as far west on the Erie Canal as we could in ten days. The distance across New York is roughly 290 miles, but following the twists and turns of the canal, we’d travel more than 340 miles through 35 locks, while obeying a 10 mph speed limit for much of the way. Certainly not a quick trip!

Although the passage seems indirect nowadays, the Erie Canal has a long history of easing the burden of western travelers. In 1817, New York’s Governor DeWitt Clinton broke ground on the artificial river. The goal was to connect the Hudson River to Lake Erie and the rest of the Great Lakes, thereby opening the west for countless settlers. Travelers could make their way in the relative comfort of a canal barge, while returning ships brought back resources from the rapidly expanding frontier. Towns sprung up along the canal, eager to offer portages to the constant traffic. The explosion of trade secured New York City’s future as one of the busiest ports in America. Within ten years, the construction of the 363-mile canal had paid for itself.

Even today, the Erie Canal is a marvel of engineering. It connects five major rivers, and rises and falls with the surrounding landscape. Dams were built to keep the canal at a relatively consistent depth, and locks accompany each dam to lift or drop the boats as required. The original canal was a man-made channel four feet deep. Mules walked along adjacent paths as they pulled the shallow-bottomed barges from town to town. In the early 20th century, the state of New York expanded the Erie Canal to accommodate much larger commercial vessels; now the canal is open only to pleasure cruisers as well as the countless bikers and runners exploring the refurbished tow paths.

The Erie Canal literally parallels the New York State Thruway and it’s pretty extraordinary that the same government agency that operates I-90 also maintains the canal at little to no expense to boaters. Throughout our trip, we encountered polite and attentive lockmasters and bridge operators who seem to enjoy their work, as well as dozens of other men and women who dredge the canal and repair the banks so that boaters can enjoy this historic corridor. For more on the history and maintenance of the Erie Canal: www.nyscanals.gov and www.eriecanalway.gov

So back to this summer’s trip: early in the morning of June 25, my dad and his older brother, Christopher, met me at La Guardia Airport on a steamy, sticky pea-soup kind of day. Not the kind of day where a 10 mph speed limit is going to do much to cool you down… We left Riverside, Connecticut and motored west into Long Island Sound. By lunchtime we were on the East River, approaching Riker’s Island and other not-so-attractive portions of New York’s urban center. Unfortunately it was extremely hazy – almost Los Angeles hazy – but we still enjoyed a spectacular view from the rivers surrounding New York City. We went under the Triborough and Queensborough Bridges, past the United Nations and the Tudor City neighborhood apartments where my great-grandparents lived, past the site of their long-ago sold Brooklyn lumberyard, and around Battery Park with a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. As we headed north on the Hudson, new piers and construction along the West Side Highway dominated the view. Sadly the visibility was poor all day, so it was difficult to see the Palisades of the Hudson River Valley. Further north, we caught a closer view of the dozens of unique island lighthouses, and Bannerman’s Castle – the unusual building constructed not as a home, but to house a Scottish collector’s arsenal! More on Bannerman’s Castle at http://www.hudsonriver.com/bannerman.htm

We spent the first night in Newburgh, New York and ate one of the better meals of the trip. With the exception of one great restaurant and the picnic dinner that Chris packied, our dining experiences were not blog-worthy… except to report the consistently amusing faces that some of us made when our yucky dinner plates arrived!!

By lunchtime on day two, we stopped for fuel in Troy, New York and prepared to enter the Erie Canal. Here’s what NOAA has to say about the upper Hudson River and Troy, New York:

Troy Lock and Dam at Troy, N.Y., 154 miles above The Battery at New York City, is the lower entrance to the New York State Canal System. The Erie Canal is 338 miles long from Waterford W across New York State to Tonawanda on the Niagara River. From Waterford, the canal follows the canalized Mohawk River, a short reach of Wood Creek, and several interspersed land cuts to Oneida Lake. After passing through the lake, the canal follows Oneida River, Seneca River, Clyde River, and several land cuts to Lyons, N.Y. … W of Lyons, the canal is an artificial channel to Pendleton, N.Y., thence the canal follows Tonawanda Creek to Tonawanda. The Erie Canal, from Waterford to Tonawanda, has 34 locks. At Waterford, a flight of 5 locks ascends 168.8 feet from the pool above Troy Lock and Dam around Cohoes Falls to the Mohawk River, thence 14 locks ascend the Mohawk Valley 236 feet to the summit level near Rome, N.Y., thence 3 locks descend 57 feet to Three Rivers, N.Y., at the junction with Oswego Canal, and thence 12 locks ascend 201 feet to the Niagara River.

What that really means is that we gained an altitude of more than 400 feet within the first half of the trip. How did the boat travel up 400 feet? With the help of the locks:

The best way to describe how a lock works is to compare it to a bathtub filling with water. Any boat, no matter how big or small, behaves like a toy floating in this bathtub. The vessel rises with the swelling water, higher and higher until it’s reached the height of the giant tank, at which point the lockmaster stops adding water. The tank is really a narrow concrete box with huge steel gates. The walls are a slimy mess – sometimes covered with soggy lichen, sometimes deeply pitted from the erosion of the rushing water.

After a boat enters the lock, the gates slowly close, and the work of the crew begins. As the water rises, the force of that surge can be incredible. On our trip, none of us wanted Dad’s pretty boat slamming into the side of that grimy wall. So we sacrificed clean hands as we pushed and pushed against the wall. Sometimes we used a pole or boat hook to push - unless you are prone to dropping them overboard! Perhaps a better analogy here is the trash compacter scene from the original Star Wars film. The walls of each lock are equally slimy. It’s equally imperative that we fend off and try to leverage something against an incalculable force. And it’s equally impossible to control until a unseen mechanism switches off.

As we traveled west, most of the canal’s locks lifted our boat between 15 and 30 feet, carrying us over the rolling hills of central New York. Other locks emptied their tanks, lowering us 12 to 24 feet. The tallest lock on the Erie Canal (once the tallest lock in the world!) is Lock 17 in Little Falls, New York. That’s a forty-foot climb in this slimy chamber – with nothing visible except blue sky and the towering walls of the lock. More on Little Falls and historic photos of Lock 17’s construction at http://lfhistoricalsociety.org/ccanalm.html

Overall the trip was incredibly relaxing. The scenery changed gradually as steep rocky banks morphed into overgrown jungles and finally into low cornfields. We all agreed we’d need a bird field guide on any future trip, as we watched kingfishers and goldfinches and countless unidentifiable birds swoop from branch to branch. It was close to the Fourth of July, so at dusk each night we saw locals camping along the canal or preparing bonfires in their own yards. Within a week we reached the edge of Lake Erie and completing the entire stretch of the Erie Canal. We cleaned up and headed our separate ways – back to Indiana, Connecticut and Los Angeles.