A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

In an alternate Los Angeles, there are canals instead of freeways (but the boat traffic jams anyway) and osteomancers gain the powers of ancient animals by mining the La Brea Tar Pits and eating their bones. The magic then settles into their bones, leading to a highly unfortunate situation in which you can gain the collected power of an osteomancer by eating... them.

In this fantastically realized alt-historical/urban fantasy setting, Daniel Blackland is the son of a famous osteomancer who infused him with power before getting killed and eaten by the current ruler of Los Angeles, the Hierarch. Rather than seeking revenge, Daniel laid low and became a highly skilled but basically mid-level thief, running a crew consisting of Jo (a shapeshifter), Cassandra (a safecracker/sharpshooter), and Moth (a fighter who can regenerate like Wolverine.)

But there's another man who also had a parent killed and eaten by the Hierarch. Gabriel Argent also sought survival over revenge, but took a completely different route. He works for the Hierarch as a highly skilled but basically mid-level investigator, whose true love is bureaucracy and city planning. When his sharp eye for oddities puts him on Daniel's trail, he borrows Max, a Hound - a highly trained and specialized slave, treated like a police dog only with less kindness. Gabriel sees potential in Max, a highly competent depressed nihilist who is under a death sentence for murdering his original handler. Their relationship was tied with the worldbuilding/magic system/sense of place for my favorite part of the book.

sholio has a review with way more detail on Gabriel & Max.

This book is basically a cross between The Lies of Locke Lamora minus the misogyny, a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits, and my "i love la" tag.

The LA-ness was SO GOOD. It feels 100% local and real and lived-in, not the sort of outsider's view of what's important about LA and its history that you often get. I literally knew EXACTLY where most of it was taking place, down to random warehouses. At one point Tito's Tacos makes a crucial appearance. That's that taco joint by the freeway three blocks from my old apartment! I cracked up that Daniel also thinks it overrated, which is a very unpopular opinion.

I also liked that okay, you get some world famous Hollywood figures, but you also get William Mulholland as a water wizard controlling the Department of Water & Power (both kinds of power), and the whole plot turns on things like the La Brea Tar Pits and LA not naturally having water.

The social/political aspects really worked for me. The central problem, which is the literal devouring of natural resources until the powerful are literally eating the powerless, is makes sense both as a metaphor and as a reality within the world of the book.

The magic system was fantastic. There's aspects which are underexplained (mostly non-osteomantic magic), but overall it's clever, evocative, original, and generally delightful. If you want super-strength, you get it from specific animals, so they're forever battling people imbued with the essences of short-faced bears, saber-tooth tigers, and, memorably, an entire herd of mammoth!

The parts of this book that were good were A+. However, it had some flaws that knock it down from excellent to very good. I think it needed one more editing pass. Several extremely important emotional moments occur entirely off-page, some of the characterization is very thin, and the crucial matter of the connections, history, and emotional bonds between Daniel and his crew are told in summary rather than shown, which made those feel thin too. There's also some significant pacing issues - the book needed at least one more chapter between the action climax and the last chapter, among other things.

My big issues fell into two general categories: important things occurring off-page, which affected the characterization and general emotional tenor, and pacing.

The book would have been SO MUCH BETTER if we'd gotten full chapters of flashback for each of Daniel's crew as actual scenes rather than Daniel narrating what happened in summary. A lot of anime/manga does this really well. It would have made the revelations seem cooler, and added a lot of depth to the characters, and given a certain spoilery revelation more punch.

Jo especially was thinly characterized, which was frustrating as it also isn't explained at all in this book how shapeshifting works and how it's different from osteomancy. A flashback chapter in which we see Daniel meet her would have helped a lot.

The explanation of why Moth can regenerate is interesting (more so in retrospect after a certain revelation, actually) but I was wildly curious while it was still a mystery, and then disappointed when Daniel just summarizes it. If it had been a flashback chapter and shown rather than told, it would have been much more satisfying.

In general, Daniel's crew is supposed to have incredibly tight and long-lived relationships, but their characterization felt thin and so I wasn't very invested in them for a lot of the book. Whereas I was extremely invested in Gabriel and Max, partly because they were cool, unusual characters, but also because they meet in the present day so we actually see their relationship develop rather than it being summary + wisecracks.

(Daniel wisecracks a lot and not very funnily. For a lot of the book he was my least favorite character.)

Other issues are super spoilery. There's one twist that made my jaw drop - it was startling, logical, perfectly done, and illuminated a whole lot of things that had happened before. I recommend that you read the book first, if you want to be surprised. But I know most of you won't, so I'll try to talk around it a little bit.

Content notes: Cannibalism, injustice, torture, police brutality, depictions of racism/colonialism, environmental issues. The book is generally very fun, but it doesn't whitewash social issues.

( Read more... )

I suspect that LA is going to be locked down even more strictly than now at any moment, and also due to the virus's doubling rate, anything people=adjacent that can be done today will be safer than doing it tomorrow.

So today I got up early - pre-coffee, even! - and ventured to The Marina del Rey Garden Center, where I made the acquaintance of Patches the friendly garden cat. The cart has my purchases - I even found California poppies in pots!

If you watch the video at the website, you'll see that it was the safest possible place - almost completely open-air and, when I went there, almost completely deserted. The parking lot is the size of a postage stamp, so a pandemic was the perfect time to go.

I figured this was going to be my last chance to get seedlings for spring and very possibly summer, so I stocked up. My strawberries have been doing very well, so I got more. Also dill, lemon balm, a cucumber, what I hope is a mini-cucumber-melon, variegated thyme, curly parsley, poppies, and probably a few other things I forget. Also ladybugs and a praying mantis case.

I've never seen the air so clear or the streets so deserted. It's beautiful and eerie. I love the natural environment of LA, and that's never been better. But I also love the people, who are the life of the city, and they're all gone, locked away like me.

I'm tending my garden for spring, and hoping the coming harvest will be both real and metaphoric.

With brand new beautiful hair! Something Alex appreciated very much:









Last night her flight was delayed, so we went to Daikokuya, an all-night ramen place. It was freezing cold (Layla found it no more than brisk) but the rest of LA agreed with me, because the place was packed. During our 45 minute wait for a table, we ate half each of a Beard Papa chocolate cream eclair and a Beard Papa strawberry cheesecake tart, then bought Melty Kiss and yatsuhashi at the Japanese market, before finally diving face-first into giant bowls of comforting hot ramen with perfectly soft-boiled eggs.

This morning my friends Halle and Ian and their son, and Layla's friend Jen and I went to NBC Seafood, where there was no line! That was a first. We feasted on sticky rice in lotus leaves, fried taro dumplings, char sir bao, slippery rice wrapped noodles, taro pudding, black sesame pudding, egg yolk buns, egg custard tarts, fried lotus paste balls, steamed sausage rolls, shrimp wrapped in nori and fried, steamed Chinese broccoli, chicken fried rice, shrimp in bell pepper cups, ube buns, and hot black sesame mochi which were so good I wish I'd had twelve of them.

On the way back we stopped at a grocery and were waylaid by small, adorable Girl Scouts. I guess we need some snacks for the plane later on...

The grocery clerk asked if we're sisters. I don't know, what do you think?

Cut for photos of Los Angeles, flowers, my hair, etc. I wanted to show you more of what LA really looks like, not just the pretty stuff. It ended up mostly pretty anyway. ( Read more... )

I work out at a YMCA on Sawtelle, at a five-block section of West LA which is full of Asian (mostly Japanese) restaurants and clothing shops and so forth. Some restaurants stay forever, while other spaces have businesses come and go in a constantly shifting rotation.

They now have Seoul Sausage, featuring kalbi sausage, tasting, yes, like kalbi and served with kimchi "slaw," and also (no, I won't try it) kalbi sausage poutine. Also Korean corn silk tea, which is like barley tea but even better: earthy but delicate, with an intense corn flavor, but not sweet.

On Saturdays, after I lift weights, I walk to the Japanese market and buy a cold bottled barley tea and a cooked-to-order okonomiyaki from the vendors outside, with their steel grill to cook the savory pancakes with shredded cabbage and two strips of bacon, topped with two sauces and a handful of dried bonito flakes.

Yesterday I checked out a new ramen restaurant. (That makes six in five blocks.) It had a printed sign posted on a podium outside, which began, "Some time ago, we died at a very popular restaurant in Tokyo." It went on to explain how that restaurant had inspired them to open one in LA.

You may have figured this out already, but I was baffled. I wondered if "to die" was an overly literal translation of some Japanese idiom - perhaps related to the old-fashioned English "to die," meaning, "to have an orgasm."

Then I saw the same sign in the restaurant's window, with a small alteration. In ball-point pen, a carat and the letter "n" had been inserted in the appropriate place over "died."

I went down the waterfall trail, rather than Trippet, as the former looked shorter and easier. Ha ha. It was until I hit the point where you have to hike in a creek swirling over large boulders interspersed with three-foot pools, and then climb up what looked like an easy scramble up a slab of knobbly rock, but was actually not, as the knobs were all smooth, wet, and slippery. I only made it up because a hiker who was already up gave me a hand.

The descent was even hairier, as you can't get an assist from either above or below. I passed down my backpack and shoes to the same helpful hiker, and only made it down on the strength of my bare toes. I expected to feel like I'd been hit by a train today - I haven't rock-climbed in years - but I'm not sore at all, so I guess I'm in better shape than I thought. Nice to know!

The waterfall is small but pretty, falling across a mossy cave and producing a small rainbow. An odd mix of succulents and ferns cling to the sheer granite cliffs surrounding it, like individual hanging gardens.

The hikers were mostly concentrated near the waterfall itself (there was a small traffic jam produced by the difficulty of the final climb) so I had my picnic elsewhere, by the shadowed banks of the creek further down, in solitude. I had the sushi hand roll special from my neighborhood market (tuna roll, spicy tuna roll, mackerel roll, eel roll), a tuna onigiri, a small cake, and two bottles of Pocari Sweat, the Japanese sports drink which advertises itself, rather disgustingly, as "the exact composition of human body fluid."

I seem to have successfully evaded the poison oak, which is amazing considering how much there was (at some points, on both sides of the very narrow path and reaching in), so it was a success all round.

Will be scarce online until my laptop comes back from the repair shop, or, worst case, I acquire a new one.)

Due to the combination of President's Day (no classes), the cancellation of the thing I had planned to do today, and the impossibility of working without a computer, I am going to put together a picnic and go commune with nature. For safety purposes since I'm going by myself, it's the Santa Inez/Trippet trail at Topanga Park. (Don't freak! It is well-marked, well-populated, and I am a knowledgeable hiker.)

I briefly explored it yesterday, after passing the sign every time I went to coach one of my students but never having time or being there at a good hiking time. But since it was spur of the moment, I wasn't properly shod and couldn't get on the waterfall trail at all, as it was too slippery/muddy. The trail criss-crossed a rushing creek, helpfully laid out with strategically placed stepping stones or logs. It was very green, and branches and vines met overhead for much of the trail, so I seemed to walk through a low, narrow tunnel made of trees.

The trail was also, alas, lined with poison oak (leaflets three, let it be), green edged with red and glistening as if dipped in oil. I kept my arms tight in to my body and threw everything in the wash, and myself in the shower, as soon as I got home.

I didn't spot much wildlife, other than hikers, but the calmer pools of the creek were full of water skaters, tiny feet dimpling the clear water.

The LA County Museum of Art is hosting an all-day giant food-and-weirdness festival, TOMORROW, for one day only!

But a few of the many featured attractions:

JEANNE DUNNING
Tomato Fight
10,000 ripe tomatoes. 10 eager performers. Come and watch the splatter.

MACHINE PROJECT (& FRIENDS)
Electric Melon Drum Circle
Participants make amplified melons using contact microphones, and then perform together in a facilitated melon percussion group. Afterwards, they eat the instruments.

STEPHEN VAN DYCK
Chewing Carolers
A chorus of four people dressed in food service outfits serenading dining guests with rehearsed chewing, smacking and guttural sounds.

SUNG-YUN PARK (WITH SOOK SHIM)
Know the Taste of Korean Pan-Fried Octopus?
Some flavors cannot be translated. A dance performance.

KAREN ATKINSON, JOHN BURTLE, ARI KLETZKY, OWEN DRIGGS
Islands of LA Presents Roots of Compromise, 2010
The artists attempted to plant a garden of radishes on the traffic island closest to LACMA, negotiating with all the required city and civic bureaucracies. Their title evokes the relationship between “radicality,” a word with the same root as “radish,” and compromise.

JONATHAN GOLD
Spamburgers and Other Delights
LA Weekly food critic reads “Spam, the American Meat,” written especially for this event.

KAREN BLACK
On Fruit
Miss Black reads poetry and sings about the wonders of fruit. [Rachel's note: When I read a few attractions aloud to a local friend, she mused, "I saw Karen Black perform once. She did an obscene act with a sweet potato." Me: "Maybe she'll do another one with a pluot!"]

EMILY KATRENCIK
A Freedom Granted Is Not a Freedom Until It Is Expressed
A portion of the interior museum wall removed, the edible portions ground up as an ingredient in a sugar-based Your chance to actually eat LACMA!
Ahmanson 2 Lobby:
All day, while supplies last

7. MICOL HEBRON
Bubble Gum Pop
A participatory chorus of synchronized bubble gum pops. Gum will be provided and then taken away.

ANNA HOMLER
(WITH JORGE MARTIN)
The Mystery of the Knife, Fork and Spoon.
The secret lives of eating utensils are explored through spoken-word, songs in alien languages and sonic manipulation.

I am on call, but hopefully won't get called and can attend for at least some of it. This sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

For everyone who's celebrating, Eid Mubarak!

Also, in case anyone was wondering, the Sekrit Career Issue of Doom was resolved in probably the best way possible given the circumstances. I'm just happy it's no longer hanging menacingly over my head.

Yesterday I went to the beach and cast bread crumbs upon the waters. (Italian-flavored, according to the carton.) A great many people on the beach for other reasons periodically wandered by and stared in perplexity at all the Jews singing in Hebrew and hurling the bread crumbs of sin into the ocean. Then we all sat down on towels and had a picnic supplied, in my case, by the local Japanese market.

A small storm had cast thousands and thousands of little live crustaceans in colorful closed shells on to the beach, most smaller than my little fingernail and some the size of the letters I type. I don't know how long they'll survive - many were well above the tide line - but under the water I could see them extending fans of translucent feelers to catch plankton. Or Italian-flavored breadcrumbs.