darkmatter

Anxious? Mixed Bipolar Disorder? Varicose Veins, need Botox, difficulty sleeping? Just a sample of the full page ads littering the front, middle and back pages of LA Weekly which incidentally sees itself as more Village Voice than Sunday Sport. Such luminaries as the Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Institute of Beverley Hills and the American College of Phelbology (don’t ask!) occupy pole position in the race to capture the reader’s disposable imagination and presumably disposable income. Later, much later, we learn of the sociopathic exploits of ‘Chester the Molester’, a sadistic rapist/serial killer who preyed on vulnerable black women in his South Central neighbourhood and whose crimes went undetected for over a decade.

Of course, LA being LA, this horrific catalogue of wanton violence, torture and worse plays second fiddle to the showtrial of Phil Spector, charged with murder, currently taking place in LA County Superior Court’s Department 106. Then it’s back to the botox and some much needed liposuction. It’s as though the news media has been taken over by plastic surgeons so that what we end up with is an extended episode of Nip/Tuck reluctantly interspersed with news bulletins. And if Chester’s wrap sheet keeps you up at night, don’t worry: you may qualify for a medication research study for anxiety at the Southwestern Research Institute, which you can always call toll-free for more information. Or perhaps a spot of colon hydrotherapy and some teeth whitening to ensure a beaming Californian smile as you sip mojitos by the pool.

Back in 1948 the cultural critic, Robert Warshow, wrote a celebrated article about the ‘gangster as tragic hero’ in which he identified the gangster as a quintessential urban figure, a product not just of the real city but of ‘the sad city of the imagination…he is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become’. The 1967 John Boorman film, ‘Point Blank’, contains just such a character, Walker, played by Lee Marvin like an anachronism from a bygone era. There are scenes in which he stares uncomprehendingly at a cold-cream advert on TV and shoots a telephone when it fails to deliver the correct message and Marvin, who called himself a ‘mean looking damn bastard’ is a man permanently at odds with an increasingly alienating environment. But it’s precisely in that space of bewilderment when faced with the shiny, high-tech surfaces of Los Angeles, that we can find common cause with Walker’s lone wolf. All the beauty enhancement in the world cannot conjure out of sight the uglier contours of city life or the charade of suburban bliss. One look at LA’s congested ‘garment’ district or the disappeared communities of its inner urban core, whose spectral trail grows ever fainter in downtown districts like Bunker Hill, is enough to convince that this is a place where all forms of violence, from community dispossession to shooting a telephone, can eventually be recomposed into a shiny new surface, preferably only accessible by car. Perhaps the most invasive surgery of all is the cosmetic restructuring of the city itself - the unkindest cut stretching from East to West where, predictably, the spluttering working-class heartlands of the East and South continually sustain and revive the richer and capricious West: as ever someone has to tend those sun-kissed lawns and serve those mojitos, and a very different beast gets to stretch out its hand to offer gratuity and enjoy luxury. And just as predictably, this is in large measure a colour-co-ordinated exercise. The closest, it seems, that many will ever get to the promise of ‘the good life’ is a sly peek beyond the manicured hedges at the inner sanctum of someone else’s presumed domestic bliss. - Hide quoted text -

The suburbs offer no respite. These are very different ‘cities of the imagination’, literally carved out of the landscape as sanctuary from urban chaos. Endless, anodyne monuments to a kind of anti-living, the saccharin exterior soon gives way to a far darker vision. Gangs of migrant labourers in fields just visible from the speeding cars passing by, bent double in 90 degree heat picking produce that will undoubtedly end up in the kind of shopping ‘experience’ - supermarkets - that would have infuriated Walker. No faces are ever visible, just mainly latino bodies warped into question marks. Not the body-popping, shape shifting release of Crazy Legs and early Hip Hop/electro but the backbreaking labour of shrunken possibility. And all the while the well-heeled traffic of ‘consumers’ passes by, oblivious or unwilling to contemplate the not so hidden cost of their ‘lifestyle’ choices. But mention the words ‘petrojunkie’ or ’self-indulgent shopper’ and just watch that sparkling Californian smile dissolve into a sneer that even a ‘mean, damn bastard’ like Lee Marvin would have been proud of.

In between times the inevitable conduit between city and suburb - the car - continues to cast a disproportionate shadow over everyday life. On the way back from a party in Culver City the other night and a salutory reminder of that other ‘human’ cost to these Californian social norms. In spite of the lateness of the hour the traffic bunching up on the freeway like the notes of an accordion. But this time it’s not roadworks - flares are being frantically lit across several lanes, ringfencing a terrible vision. A three car pile up, debris strewn across the freeway, flashing lights and bodies covered in blankets, other folk mercifully with nothing worse than superficial injuries. Rubbernecking, because that’s what you do, then speeding off, consigning the image to a kind of repressed history, because that’s equally what you do. The done thing.

But for all this talk of bodies, there’s very little about the heart. Then just when you’d forgiven theory its endless abstractions from the frequently terrible ‘everyday’, something to make the heart beat a little faster. And appropriately enough in a space dedicated to unravelling the open-ended nature of everyday life - the campus. Having just completed a lecture on the profane soundscapes of the modern city, my ears picked up the instantly familiar, comforting refrain of ska outside the lecture theatre. Following the sound like a crackhead smelling snood, moments later I found myself in a music venue called ‘the barn’ struggling to comprehend, but far happier than Walker. In the manner of a Hollywood film ‘pitch’, it was basically The Specials meets a Mexican Mariachi Band with a mainly Mexican psychobilly/ska crowd - the bastard offspring of Oscar de la Hoya, Morrissey and Roddy Radiation. Skabilly rebels indeed and with an amazing dance to boot - the best I can describe it is a composite skank (look it up, the word didn’t always mean ‘whore’!) reaching out to the spirit of ‘69, the ’skinhead moonstomp’ of Symarip and a kind of sideways head and arms movement reminiscent of the cartoon choreography of Popeye the Sailor. In keeping with the surreal flavour, there’s free slices of cake and almost unlimited lemonade. It’s an exhilarating moment, to feel another spectral trail surge through your body, to sense Walker smile and cast off the shackles of sharp-suited indignation. History, it seems, repeats itself, and not always as failure. Point Blank, released in ‘67 as an antidote to the ‘Summer of Love’ taking place on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, with Walker - the lean, spare nemesis of Hippy utopia - a proto-suedehead before the term was even invented. And the recovery of that identity from the dustbin of history by an unlikely group of modern-day outsiders. Softening the edges, blurring the lines. No amount of Nip/Tuck can take away from that.