Ry Cooder puts California tales on page in his book 'Los Angeles Stories,' as he did in song on his albums 'Chavez Ravine,' 'My Name Is Buddy,' 'I, Flathead.'
By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic
December 4, 2011
Let's start with the hands, Ry Cooder's hands. They're large, expressive: hands you could see wrapped around a guitar neck, or in the act of making things. They move when he speaks, creating shapes in the air that take form and dissipate, all in the space of a few words. On a Friday afternoon at the Petersen Automotive Museum, Cooder is using those hands to help recount the saga of "El Chavez Ravine," a 1953 Chevy pickup he commissioned to be rebuilt in 2007 in the style of a vintage ice cream truck and covered with an elaborate mural, by the artist Vincent Valdez, depicting the eviction of Mexican American families from the neighborhood that is now home to Dodger Stadium.
The same story inspired Cooder's 2005 album "Chavez Ravine," the first installment in his so-called "California Trilogy" (the others are "My Name Is Buddy" [2007] and "I, Flathead" [2008]), and, in some ways, it also sits as a ghost narrative to his first book, "Los Angeles Stories" (City Lights: 230 pp., $15.95 paper), a collection of eight loosely linked pieces of fiction that go back in time to
a different Southern California, where musicians and aircraft workers and trolley drivers come together and apart in little bungalows and bars. (His latest album, released in August, is "Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down.")
..."Los Angeles Stories" operates almost entirely on such a principle, offering a deftly rendered panorama of the city between 1940 and 1958. Its characters are the forgotten, the lost: a man who goes door-to-door for the Los Angeles City Directory, a tailor who make suits for musicians, a drummer on a three-week gig in Kingman, Ariz., sneaking back into California with piano player Billy Tipton and her underage girlfriend under the cover of night.
full article http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-ca-ry-cooder-20111204,0,2923898.story
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