This is pretty messed up. I’ve been re-reading James Ellroy’s ‘The Black Dahlia’, the first novel in his L.A. Quartet and one that I haven’t revisited in many years. Thus, it’s fair to say that I am fully immersed in the post WW2 L.A. noir of it all. Now, YouTube has a pretty good idea of what I’m currently interested in based on my viewing and searching activity. It’s one of the things I love about the site–it greets me every morning with a happy, helpful heaping of what it believes will give me joy and comfort. But today I opened YouTube up and found the above video, which is of beautiful faded color images of L.A. in the late 40s. The person who posted it put a lovely piano piece behind it that’s deeply evocative of the era and the mood of noir nostalgia. In other words a very good score against a series of images that feel an awful lot like the book I’m reading and the mood it evokes. I have not been looking at related videos at all–just reading a late 40s L.A. noir book.

Which makes me think that YouTube’s knowledge of my activities is not limited simply to my use of their site, but that it has somehow succeeded in breaking through to my very consciousness, divining what I am reading in another room nowhere near my computer. Does believing this make one of those Covid-Denying/Flag-Wearing/Rigged-Election believing doofuses who think Bill Gates is ransacking your brain? And–worse yet–are they right? I’m quite serious when I say that when the lovely video popped up I kind of looked over my shoulder just to make sure nobody was watching me. And I’m not at all convinced that nobody is. On that note, enjoy the views of a very different Los Angeles than the one we currently know. By the way, the year is 1948 as evidenced by the theater showing ‘June Bride’, a 1948 Bette Davis/Robert Montgomery comedy directed by a man with a name we should all aspire to have; Bretaigne Windust.