About three days ago, I heard about the storm Hurricane Hilary and that it will come up to the Los Angeles area. All the news said I should be alert and ready for the storm, which can be two or three inches of rain and winds at 35 to 45 mph. After hearing this news, I ordered and received three novels by Ann Quin due to a fascinating blog by Dennis Cooper on the author. Early this morning, I went out to get some extra food, such as Amy’s Vegan and Gluten free burrito and various Amy’s frozen Vegan meals. Amy’s tends to be my frozen food need, and for the past three years, I have been eating Amy’s vegan products for lunch. If I eat before noon, I tend to keep my weight down. Most importantly, I purchase a jar of unsalted roasted peanuts to put on my instant oatmeal and almost everything I eat. I have a craving for a nutty taste in all my food. This started when I gave up my daily bottle of wine consumption.
I expect we will lose power over the night, so there will be no TV. Last night Lun*na and I watched The Wages of Fear, a film I have seen many times, but this is the first time for Lun*na. If things get boring during the blackout, we can replay some of the scenes from the movie by placing our chairs together and pretending we are driving a massive truck down a dangerous road with nitroglycerine in the back. As I researched this film by the great director Henri-Georges Clouzot, I discovered an actor I had never noticed; Peter van Eyck was a German born in Poland. In the movie, he plays Bimba, one of the drivers who volunteer for this suicide mission, hoping to obtain $2,000 for his troubles.
van Eyck was the boyfriend of Jean Ross in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, and she was the role model for the Christopher Isherwood character Sally Bowles in his short story Sally Bowles, in his collection Goodbye to Berlin. Which later became the stage and film Cabaret.
Ross is an unbelievable figure who went from Berlin cabaret life to becoming a hardcore Communist and wrote film criticism for the Daily Worker. Concerning van Eyck, he eventually left Germany before Hitler came to power, worked with Orson Welles’ theater in New York, and became a working actor.
He also married Ruth Ford, a model, and actor, and she’s the sister of the wonderful Surrealist poet Charles Henri Ford. Strange enough, Ms. Ford was the first to call 911 when she heard the shots from her Dakota apartment window that led to John Lennon’s death.
And it just dawned on me that the food I bought, except for the jar of unsalted peanuts, I may not be able to cook if the power goes out. Although I may starve, I have a lot of things here to feed my mind.