City of Angels

I finally got around to completing the novel Lolita some time last month, coursing through the pages in the afternoons with a flurried, barely contained sense of excitement, intervals of held breaths; indulging in extravagant pauses to let myself immortalize the porcelain-delicate portraiture of nymphage, the demonic, rich and sweet description of Humbert's landscape of erotica, and sad American scenery; eventually emerging from the experience utterly moved and crushed. There were shards of kaleidoscopes between the layers of words and meaning, smithereens of Humbert's visions, the sharp tang of his desire. But throughout I couldn't help but be disappointed at how Lo was simply out of my reach. Her reflection seemed only perceptible through the gleam and curvature of the bell-jar of Humbert's narrative -and the careless public eye seems only to subsist on the occasional lucid glimpses of a thigh, an arm or lower-lip. This of course did not dent the fable one bit -in fact the bubble of hyper-reality through which we came to be acquainted with Lolita, part Humbertian mythology, part plain Dolores- was what made it, as Vanity Fair had put it, "the only convincing love story of our century"; nevertheless it got into the way of my internalizing of characters, how I'd always try to hunt for an opening, like a tree hollow, and climb into them.

But a review of Lolita is not the focus of this post today; much had been said about it, and much more will be said in the future, and for now I'm satisfied with the small clipping of dialogue I had just inserted into the literary discourse in the blogosphere. There is something I wish to share about my analysis of Lo though, the singular flecks of color that radiate hotly beneath the foam of Humbertian tale-spinning, the details that give you an idea of who plain Dolores, Dolores in slacks, is, the life she may have led if she had never stumbled into the periphery of her European stepfather. What I feared most was not that she might ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away. I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood -of the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead. And all the while it was Lo with the lurid movie magazines, the star-studded tennis racket, the grit of her lipstick, her quiet navigation towards the valley of stars. It was this thread of personage that delighted me, the clench of teeth as I scoured underneath the lines for signs of its endurance, and the possibilities. 

The process of uncovering a mythology is almost a spiritual experience -it falls short of the metaphysical only because of its intrinsic aesthetic nature. Aesthetic, because it combines theory, which is inherently romantic, with harmony of the senses, and this synchronicity helps to create what Leo Tolstoy calls the complete illusion of beauty. It is the urban legend that lures me at the moment; if there is to be a single tableau, sculpture, installation that is most authentic to humanity I would attribute it to be the urban landscape -for it is arguably the only true instance of collaborative, and progressive creation of our kind, for its physical shell mimics the mortal frame, and what informs its clockwork is both the subconsciousness of the individual and the consciousness of society- and underlying all this is our most frank discourse with geography yet, making the city a living archive of this precarious dialogue. Though I did not know it at that point, the patchwork of Dolores' identity gave me a vantage point for exploring Los Angeles, and the supernova of memories and dreams that constitute its Milky Way, stellar explosions that have continually defined and re-invented its myths.

The preliminary sketch provided by Lolita saw a build up in conceptualization when I read Pink Smog: Becoming Weetzie Bat, by Francesca Lia Block. From the eyes of 13-year old Weetzie, we see plastic, visual snippets of 1980s Los Angeles -dives into the Sunset Strip, a bird's eye view from the Hollywood sign, a visit to Marilyn Monroe's resting place. But it was the less symbolic stopovers to which I had latched onto with a supernatural nostalgia. I had this city and I decided that I had better fall in love with her again because she wasn't going anywhere and neither was I. The black pavement, dark to hide the dirt, sparkled with diamond chips in the burning sun. Poisonous but gorgeous flowers bloomed in white, coral, magenta, and red. The sunsets in L.A. were pink with smog. At night the lethal freeways became the Milky Way. I adored how the descriptions of Los Angeles were suffused with a kind of seductive poison on the inside, and whitewashed with a Jetsons' style aesthetic on the outside. He nodded and moved closer. He smelled like sand and tar and wind, gasoline and sawdust and oranges. He smelled like Los Angeles. 

Decadence

As much as it had been ignored at the box office during the time of its release, I think one of the most powerful soliloquies amongst all the period movies I have been climbing into in the past few weeks was delivered in Foxes (1980). Powerful, because I think no script had ever been able to provide such succinct, lucid and spot-on commentary on the big and usually nebulous and elusive ideas that lurk behind time periods, in this case the late 1970s. In a remote corner of Los Angeles, 15-year old Jeanie (portrayed by Jodie Foster) tells Brad (portrayed by Scott Baio) about how the people of her generation had lost touch with the notion of pain by dismissing it as an illusion. "Like it isn't even real" -these words were a mirror to the society I saw through the lens of the film, where family units disintegrated due to failed parenthood, parents who couldn't escape their internal labyrinths of pain, where youth had only the pedestal of vice to kneel at, and everyone's existence ebbed away in the numbing soundscape of rock and roll. The danger of anesthesia was encapsulated in the climax of the movie, where Annie (played by Cherie Currie) crashed headlong into her own death after letting drugs take over the helm of her life for too long a time. Her death shook her friends' world up a little, and was perhaps the driving force behind their acting upon the pain radiating underneath the wounds inflicted on their young lives -but even at the end of the film I still sensed the dust of illusion, dust which might have obliterated those wounds from sight and from sensation if no one had interrupted their descent. 

For a long time now I have found myself revisiting vintage America -exploring the various ideals and philosophies that underlay certain time periods, as well as the glorious and decaying aesthetic empires that these past eras have left behind for the folks of the 21st century. The more prominent of these musings, which will be featured further down in this post, included The Great American Road Trip, or it seemed so, which took Route 66 by storm; old Las Vegas, with its delightful crass and neon haven; obsolete boomtowns, subjects of urban decay theory, also of a certain Bob Dylan song. Part of the reason for my fascination with the above memorabilia stems from how they form a part of that delicate history that existed just before the onset of the digital and globalized age. Delicate for two reasons: if everything everybody is saying about how digital archives will soon see the nature of history altered and fade nostalgia to an irrelevant blur is true, that period of history will be the last time humanity can participate in a single consciousness as a collective whole to create ideals, aesthetics, whatever. At the same time this period of history is special because it stands just behind the present day and age, and hence possesses a form of invincibility, because our inability to consume it whole has in turn spawned a diverse array of culture cults (which I hope everybody finds something worth celebrating in itself!). If you've stuck with me for this long, I hope you'd enjoy cruising through the New World as much as I did, and that my 21st century voice would find a balance between romanticization, satire, and pure enjoyment of great ages past.

1. The Great American Road Trip

Credits of images go to http://www.pbase.com/ronhrl and http://www.stuckincustoms.com/

In their historical context, the growth of what we have come to identify as the staple accessories of the American road trip -road-side establishments of motels, gas stations, 24-hour diners and bars- was in fact a not-so-extraordinary, complementary developmental feature of the advent of the automobile and the highway. As ownership of automobiles became more widespread and the density of transportation networks increased, these establishments eventually came to colonize the road side in order to take advantage of the economic opportunities the popularization of road trips had brought about. But it seems as though this supposed secondary landscape to the road trip had been rendered into the big picture -and most of the time they stand in the foreground of Americana portraits. After all it is them which form the bulk of what we term "Americana kitsch". The immense flow of traffic that was the source of life of the American road trip -for can we imagine how many individual stories and exchanges were transpired along the way?- is not so often the memento that we hold close to our hearts than the abandoned road-side diner or discolored motel sign. The enduring backdrop -the diner menu which stayed original throughout the years, the unfaltering neon lights and the barmen and receptionists whom have seen it all- against which some of the most dazzling of automobile history unfolded and continues to unfold seems to me to have a firmer presence in both the individual and public imagination. 

2. Vegas

Images the courtesy of inoldlasvegas.com

Images the courtesy of www.neonmuseum.org

If aesthetic judgement carried equal weight as to that of its moral counterpart, I would think it may be possible to exempt Las Vegas from condemnation for its celebration of vice based on the grounds of aesthetic redemption. Or perhaps its graphic neon playground that has become the face of vice itself is the ultimate crime the city has committed. The title of today's post was inspired by a gallery that featured photography of what the Neon Museum of Las Vegas terms its Neon Boneyard -basically a wasteland for the now dysfunctional neon signs that once illuminated the vulgar glory of the city. The immortality of mirages and a symbolic neon grave -you can always count on the city of vice for a fancy visual style.

3. North Country Blues

Images the courtesy of www.urbanghostsmedia.com

North Country Blues, Bob Dylan

Come gather 'round friends
And I'll tell you a tale
Of when the red iron pits ran empty
But the cardboard filled windows
And old men on the benches
Tell you now that the whole town is empty.

In the north end of town
My own children are grown
But I was raised on the other
In the wee hours of youth
May mother took sick
And I was brought up by my brother.

The iron ore it poured
As the years passed the door
The drag lines an' the shovels they was a-hummin'
'Til one day my brother
Failed to come home
The same as my father before him.

Well a long winter's wait
From the window I watched
My friends they couldn't have been kinder
And my schooling was cut
As I quit in the spring
To marry John Thomas, a miner.

Oh the years passed again
And the givin' was good
With the lunch bucket filled every season
What with three babies born
The work was cut down
To a half a day's shift with no reason.
Then the shaft was soon shut
And more work was cut
And the fire in the air, it felt frozen

Singling out Chloride, a ghost town found in Arizona, presents as skewed a perception as choosing Shanghai or Beijing to represent the quintessential Chinese city. The repercussions of the gold and silver rushes that ushered waves of frenzy into the American continent run far deeper and more insidiously than what we are led to perceive and believe -and folk singer Bob Dylan reminds us of the very real suffering experienced by victims of short-sighted developmental schemes. Though urban decay and illusion exist side-by-side on a fine line, I still think it's fair to let the fable of gold rushes live on, and to not underestimate the value art, such as the 'Chloride Murals' (depicted above, the work of hippie artist Roy Purcell) can bring to boomtowns -towns which have only have a physical shell, and a localized existence that is more transient than life is itself.