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.