THOMAS LARSON

(San Diego Reader May 8, 2003)

In 1940, the recently widowed and wealthy Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch bought a small estate in the Hollywood hills and sought counsel from a medium named Sardoney about her love life. Known also by his epithet the Human Radio, Sardoney channeled news that a fresh husband was in transit and that Clara could not “escape this appointment with Destiny.” The irrepressible Clara opened herself to the possibility. Soon she met and started dating a dashing Russian émigrè musician, who claimed to have conducted many of the world’s greatest orchestras and to be well-acquainted with several U.S. presidents. (Nearly all his claims were lies.) Jacques Samossoud was the man and Clara was smitten. In 1944, the pair were married. In a nod to the New Age, she wrote of their union as “positively miraculous in its multifarious strata of rainbowism.” He was 50, and she was 70.

(San Diego Reader April 24, 2003)

It was no accident, said San Diego clairvoyant Dr. James Capers, that movie mogul and occult aficionado Steven Spielberg attended his lecture in February, when Capers demonstrated his "spiritual gifts" at the Los Angeles Conscious Living Expo. Capers surmises that Spielberg came to his lecture (which he describes as "sitting-on-the-floor-room only") because Spielberg had been cursed by an African witch doctor: "Mr. Spielberg should be afraid -- these demonic powers are quite real."

According to April's Vanity Fair, Michael Jackson had Baba, a "voodoo priest" from Mali, brew up death curses for Spielberg, Hollywood powerbroker David Geffen, and 23 other Jackson "enemies." Baba, who is probably closer to a witch doctor than a voodoo priest, nonetheless received $150,000 for the conjuration that included a ritual sacrifice of 42 cows.

(Eclectica Magazine March/April 2003)

In San Diego where I'm a contributing writer to a weekly feature newspaper, I decide to profile the world of pedophiles and child molesters-those who prey on strangers (the youth group volunteer or coach who puts himself in contact with young boys and girls; the maker and sender of kiddie porn on the Internet) and those who prey on children within families (dads, grandpas, uncles, brothers who to molest children have opportunities that are difficult to detect). To begin, I contact the man responsible for prosecuting child porn manufacturers and distributors in San Diego, deputy district attorney Jeff Dort. We meet in his office on the twelfth floor of the Hall of Justice, a cubicle crammed with computers, stockpiled videotapes, pamphlets, files, and shelves of binders in which he is accumulating evidence for several cases.

(The Redwood Coast Review Spring 2003)

Get Me Rewrite!

Spike Jonze’s film Adaptation has as its main theme the writer’s struggle to create work of integrity and originality in a world ruled by the corporate demands of sameness and success. This struggle manifests itself in the quirky screenwriter Charlie Kaufman who, on the heels of his previous kooky success, Being John Malkovich, is hired to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, a book about the fascination a few people (Orlean included) have with this plant. Producers want Kaufman’s weirdness but they also want a hit, at least, enough of their investment returned to finance the next venture. A hit, in Kaufman’s over-reactive mind, is the most obviously awful story he could write—a fast-paced thriller with young male-female leads who learn redemptive lessons about love in a violence-obsessed and paranoid world—apparently, what most Americans want and what producers produce. So Kaufman’s drama becomes one of trying not to write such a film. But he ends up writing it anyway in the guise of writing a movie about the actual peril of not writing the particular movie he is writing.

(Written Spring 2003)

In the top-spinning passage of 30 years—after the sink of high school, one matchstick marriage, and two suddenly grown-and-gone children—I have kept few gifts. Giving up stuff to kids or AmVets just happens, and most of what isn’t given up is misplaced or lost, another sort of unloading. One piece I cannot lose—the maroon scarf that Roxanne knitted and sent me to California with, after I had dropped out of college during the Vietnam War and my draft number came up. I can’t get rid of that scarf, its slapdash clump laying in my closet all these years, sentenced to the pile of its tossing. My fingers still love to lace and heft and tug its six-foot long mesh, purl-knit, purl-knit, a shovel-full of cloth. The scarf feels defiantly alive: its mesh breathes; its weave has yet to unravel; its tensile wholeness might still coil to warm one neck as easily as it might hang another from the rafters.

I was twenty, Roxanne thirty-two. Students at the University of Missouri, we met one night, leaving the palatial library at closing time.

(Written February 2003)

Ever since that lunch-hour horror on April 21, 1999, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris murdered 13 people, then killed themselves, at Columbine High School, there’s been controversy—not so much about the culture of violence that spawned the attack but the "new faith" that has risen in its wake. At issue in Watson’s short book is the "martyred" girls, Cassie Bernall and Rachel Scott, the two of the thirteen who were Christians. Their brethren, mostly evangelicals, maintain that the pair, separately, replied when asked by the gunmen whether they believed in God—both, supposedly, said yes, and then were shot, supposedly, for believing. Justin Watson’s fact-obsessed book about their martyrdom presents near-conclusive evidence that these statements were not true and that the evangelicals, among them Darnell Scott, the father of Rachel, have propagated the untruth ceaselessly. Taking this story to frightened young people in school assemblies, they insist that Christianity be put back into public schools and that violence in America is the result of godlessness or, better, Christlessness.

(San Diego Reader October 3, 2002)

In recent years, the 855 employees of the San Diego Water Department have faced scandals, alleged mismanagement, media scrutiny, and the rebuke of the City Council. All this began in 1999 when news stories appeared locally about water thieves and industrial hogs who didn’t pay their bills—accusations that proved true and forced changes in how the 100-year-old agency operates. Consequently, the department has new policies to deal with the press. Senior public information officer Kurt Kidman said that "10 years ago we might [have been] a whole lot more accommodating than we are right now." But today, he said, the department is "in a real difficult position. We’re definitely under the gun with Channel 10. When we breathe, they want to know how much it cost us." In 1999 KGTV/Channel 10 reported on how "big water customers are allowed to run up huge bills that go unpaid." In the "hidden meter" scandal, reporter Mark Matthews discovered one million dollars’ worth of unpaid bills, with "dozens of industrial water meters . . . recording only 10 percent of the water going through them."