Arumbaya

September 5th, 2009 · No Comments

Day 6: The Broken EarAfter a long five days of jury duty for me and school prep for Aimee, we headed up to the central coast for a friend’s wedding today.

We started with a pre-breakfast snack and a stop in the photobooth at the Woolworth building in Oxnard, and then on to our real breakfast at the Cold Spring Tavern outside of Santa Barbara, a Huell Howser recommendation.

We stopped for tastings at the Firestone Winery and the Rancho Sisquoc winery, where we lounged in their picnic area and listened to the band, and I read my next Tintin book, The Broken Ear.

The book is still an early entry in the series, and still has the same somewhat less sure, less flowing drawing style, and Tintin with the same rounded face.

The copy I read is one of our well-worn originals, printed in the ’70s and only $3.95, with the tableau and blurb on the back cover, as opposed to the grid of book covers that they feature these days.

This book introduces one of the iconic Tintin images: along with the crab seal and the Kih-Oskh insignia from the previous two books, the Arumbaya fetish is one of the most recognizable icons from the series. The room full of replicas in the book prefigures the production of actual tiny replicas for sale to fans like me.

The book is a page-turning adventure, as Tintin tries to track down the statue from the Ethnography Museum to South America and back again. The narrative flows well, and introduces us to a few characters we’ll meet again, including General Alcazar and Pablo, whom Tintin spares and who becomes indebted to him, a not unusual plot line.

Some other notes: we see another relic from the early style, a dashed sight line, as well an occasional inset close-up, and another Sherlock Holmes reference. Other patterns also emerge: Tintin rescues Snowy by his tail from a rushing river, Tintin gets saved from execution by outwitting his enemies, or by the intervention of a secret ally, all of which get repeated in later books. Before this reading, I never knew the supposed language of the Arumbayas was actually readable, a sort of phonetic cockney-accented English. You almost have to say it out loud for it to make sense, but it does. Did I know when the two men who jumped into the sea after their precious diamond are shown being escorted away by two devil figures that they were dead and going to hell? Probably not. Interesting.

To continue on with our trip, we grabbed lunch in Arroyo Grande, enjoyed a tasting at the picturesque Talley Vineyards, and returned to town for some amazing ice cream at Doc Burnstein’s, where we’d been on our previous trip in 2006.

We headed up to San Luis Obispo and checked into the legendary Madonna Inn. Our room, “Bit of Solvang,” is very blue though not particularly Danish, but the place as a whole is pretty nuts. Imagine the House on the Rock as a hotel, and that’s about it. Motion-activated water-wheel bathroom troughs, pink leather everywhere, lots of carved wood and fountains and other indescribable amazingness.

We had dinner in town at a tasty Italian restaurant, watched some swing dancers at the semi-private party back at the hotel, and then called it a very long day.

Tags: Books · Los Angeles · Nostalgia