This morning my mom called me to tell me that a tornado had touched down nearby. Normally, this occurs if a tornado hits near home, in downstate Illinois. But this time she was calling from across town (LA). I hadn’t yet seen the front page of the paper, featuring this photo, but the freaky weather yesterday touched down in Riverside, not the farm country I associate it with. Apparently it hailed downtown. And Sherall, our admin coordinator in my office, reported a huge instant deluge while walking across campus that, unfortunately, poured on her and our new hire, who probably thought she was moving away from the volatility of midwestern weather.
I guess there are a number of reasons to be alarmed at the haywire qualities of this latest streak of climate change. But there is a certain uncanniness of tornado season that I must admit to enjoying. In retrospect, the tornado drills that we had growing up were certainly done under the aegis of spooky Cold War alarmism, with their mass ritual, infinite intervals of waiting for nothing to ever happen, suspended fear, and warning sirens. But they also had a delightful mood of conspiracy, tingle and petty triumph at seeing things were absolutely out of the hands of the people in charge. (Needless to say, we never actually got hit severely, otherwise it might have been a different story than all this child-time potentiality.)
I guess kids in California probably don’t grow up with weekly air raid siren testings, as we did, year round, and not just during storm season. (*Correction–my mom tells me it is one Tuesday a month, not every week.) This sound also worked to signal tornado warnings (not watches, that’s just minor vigilance level). At one school, we would bolt across the open field to the high school, with textbooks, and sit, I think in the gym, till “all clear” was called. At the other school, we would exit the classroom, line up by our steel lockers, sit cross-legged on the cold linoleum, and place the thickest of our textbooks in “chalet” shapes on our the backs of our heads, like turtles. As usual, we would snap to alphabetical order, in front of our own lockered gym clothes and sack lunches (in case of emergency). After a while, we’d get to go back in, or walk reluctantly across the big grassy field back to school.
Come to think of it, the whole reason I came to know many of the names of small towns around the state is from hearing long lists on the radio of tornado-warned towns, and hearing them singled out when it was safe to emerge from the shelter or basement. That and snow days, exciting for their own reason (a day off school, of course)!.
Yesterday in my neighborhood was about 30% of a tornado atmosphere. The sky was definitely getting there, but you didn’t have the charged mugginess, ozone smell, and heightened saturated color you get in tornado season, even almost in the LAT photo above–something like a cross between a storm cloud and Pepto-Bismol, and utterly beautiful over the green grass that hasn’t yet begun to turn crappy brown, the way it will stay most of the summer.
Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven captures some of this intensity and saturation. (Although apparently it is supposed to be set in Texas, so scratch that. I always thought the draft furnaces screamed “Chicago.” The most interesting part of the survey doc Visions of Light is actually about the 5-minute increments just before sunset in which Néstor Almendros systematically shot the landscape.)
Sômai Shinji’s Typhoon Club is also worth a sitting, if you get the chance at some art house. It’s one of the overlooked-eighties Japanese indie films lost in the hype for “edginess.” It’s about a bunch of high school students who get trapped in school during a typhoon, having the same effects as a tornado watch, but over more time–cloistered cameraderie, heightened sense of everything, boy/girl antics.
Not to be confused with the ridiculous Suicide Club of a couple years back. But definitely to be linked as the provocation for an inspired pink film about a bunch of people who make a suicide pact (one sobering “actual” suicide, and the rest very funny stories of the various loser paths that get them to such a state), duct-tape all the doors and windows, start telling their respective woebegone sagas, and because it’s a pink movie, discover their love of life by means of an orgy! In English it is called Ambiguous (ha!–take that, Canadian Customs!). But the very funny Japanese title, which genre deserves a post of its own, does not really fly in translation, but is a wonderfully deadpan and klunky-kanji-filled slogan starring the sincerest exclamation point you ever met, Obscenity Net Band –Let’s Go!
