Segments of the city

Segments of the city
Venice Beach


A lazy Sunday floated by with no particular notice. chores done, meals consumed. The coolness of lazing in a new place - a bungalow - way under market rate rental - that has its own laundry room and an airy living room was not worn out for me. But a lingering restlessness keep me plugged in onto the digital tubes

The vast teaming chilled lazy outline of an empty city yields rewards to those who have the energy and will to seek. A bulletin board message about a panel discussion about the 50th year of On The Road’s publishing stirred something in me. I was less interested in the panel and more interested in the space it was taking place in.

Venice Beach is a bright, sun filled grotto with uber-gentrification, credit debt-fueled prosperity swelling the briny air. The ghosts that inspired danger have been cornered and expelled with dark marble home refurbishment, gelato shops and very good clean coffee corners. The past still lingers simply because the constant gnawing of the sea air will erode all human endeavors - but the dark myths that the ruins of faux euro inspired housing inspired - the raw meat, its stagnant canals and fading facades given to a whole generation of poets and musicians has long been painted over. Panorama City’s Wal-Mart anchored mall with the Aztec pyramid inspired electronics retail store has way more menace if only due to the inspiration that borrowing imagery from a culture that practiced routine human sacrifice to ensure the sun rose is the best decorative motif to inspire sales of 42” plasma screen TV’s on monthly installment plans.

The space is a non profit organization dedicated to local poetry and lit. It’s a two story white building keeping the flame alive from a largely forgotten past. LA has spaces like this place and businesses that exist from other times and somehow are held in a psychic amber - do you want a 30’s era tiki drink or do you want to gaze upon movie palaces from the Jazz era, or eat a French dip with sawdusty floors and pig feet snacks appetizers? It’s around if you look. Time has unrelenting effects and more and more the quirk is slowing being drained out of the city by unrelenting family friendly or neo-decadence (tm) newness.

A quick solo freeway trip and I find the place. I take in the very obsolete bathrooms and the small corner books store amid the white walls and the empty second story photography gallery. There is a pic of Viggo Mortensen at a recital in protesting the Iraq war. The building was turn of the previous century old and held a faint underlying pulse of a hardscrabble group of idealists keeping on keeping on. The location alone is something a developer would sell his firstborn twice over to condo-fy.

A few males are browsing in the bookstore - mostly my age and looking like lost english teachers undergoing a decades long neutering process. I can slouch with the best of them and I fit right in much to my quiet bemusement.

A woman about 50ish or so opens up a side door with a beaten up cashbox - I donate my 5 bucks and get in. The seats are leftovers from old movie theaters and I head to the back of the four rows and sit in the back.
It starts with a woman doing a folk song, then the panel is introduced. I survey the crowd. It’s a little of what I expect - middle aged male loners, old school hippies, bespectacled late 30ish Gen X boys - and what I don’t expect: a small group of women, sprinkled about the audience - younger and older. It was not an extra credit assignment for the younger ones, I just did not get that vibe - and no BF in site for most of them. For Kerouac?? Hmmm..

The people are filling up the seats - an excuse me and a young woman sits next to me.

She is blond, light-skinned 19-22 if she is an hour. Just filling in the slippers, longish shorts for a misty cold night and perfectly painted fingernails. Nice.

Just as the introductions to the panelists start my body starts feeling something it has not felt in awhile. After the thyroid being nuked at the age of 29 my body has been on a major even keel that discouraged spontaneous displays of testosterone engorgement. I have been very comfortable with this body. Its a low key body - hefty for someone used to being rail thin but it kept me unembarrassed and de geeked to a point. Now it was stirring with a feeling both familiar and alien to me. Just sitting next to this young woman was carbonating hormones in a way that lay dormant for a decade. Involuntary and unexpected.

After the first panelist noted that the jazz bob that Kerouac based his writing style on was totally lost to the readers of today, I was struggling with my intense desire to get away from her - and move to a different row. I wanted to have a backpack or sweater or something I could use to ummm.... block the visual. I adjusted my arm, kept my focus face forward, crossed my leg and kept as still as I could while my body - achingly, almost painfully - relived it teenage years for a bit.

One of the younger dark haired panelists recited up a Tibetan Buddhist prayer for Jack - after a bit my body calmed down and the sensation passed. I even asked her for the time and she read it off a retro digital watch in the style of watches from the legendary 80’s. I loved that watch. I don’t think much of the 80’s.

After some tantalizing but inconclusive bantering - hinting at flashes about what kept people intrigued about the Duluoz myths - the QA session started. I ranted about how I never wanted to see a On the Road movie - why? - Some things should be kept in its time and place as the form its born to be in.

A women in the next row - brunette and tattooed - using everything to look like a punk’ed Betty Page and she succeeded - in her mid 30’s spoke up. She exclaimed her enthusiasm about an author who wanted to revive hitchhiking - what was her point - she enthused the point was to hitchhike and to make love and to be in the moment. The older male panelists made ummmmmmm sounds exclaiming some discomfit - at the hitchhiking suggestion but I also think it was the purity of emotion she had when she made the making love comment - dourly I think the men felt the times are too entrenched with evil but also the rebellious, alive feeling that Karouc engendered was long gone - replaced by a meager but well earned stability.

To my ears she held a feeling that was alive - expressed in a way that my gender had no license for in this context. The subject matter somehow would have its unseen influence regardless how staid the environment was.

I smiled internally - at the end I made some small talk and pulled my scarf around my neck and went into the misty night - happily bemused.