Category: The Golden State

So yesterday I dodgeballed from Hearst Castle and called it a “stately pleasure dome”, as Orson Wells had done in the movie Citizen Kane, not realizing I had never read the full text of “Kubla Kahn”, the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that contains that line. So I’ve copied it below.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail :
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

I think I’m gonna have to see Citizen Kane again when I get home and maybe check out RKO 281. Also I hear David Nasaw’s biography of William Randolph Hearst is pretty damn good.

Fascinating article in the New Yorker this week by Tad Friend about Los Angeles and its culture of high speed car chases. Real ones, not those in the movies. Though for some idiotic reason, the magazine’s website has included this Q&A with Mr. Friend about the article instead of the article itself, it still left me curious enough to ask the following questions…

1) Would there be high speed chases if we couldn’t see them on television? In other words, is the fact that they draw huge television ratings a big part of why this article was written?

2) Mr. Friend concludes that technology exists or will soon where you can simply shut off a car’s engine remotely. When the cops can do that, will that be the end of the high speed chase?

3) Will you be sad about it?

4) What is the best high speed chase on film ever and is the answer strict geographic chuvanism? Because the answers I usually here are Bullitt (San Francisco), To Live and Die in L.A. (Los Angeles), The French Connection (New York) and The Blues Brothers (Chicago).

5) Have you met or have a six degrees connection to someone who stood beside the freeway as OJ passesd yelling “Go Juice Go!”

6) Why does Mr. Friend, who lives in New York, keep writing “Letters from California” as if California is a foreign country instead of the most populous state in the union?

Answer any and all.