End of Summer Blues
In my larval, pre-blogging days, I always
faced the back-to-school moment with abject dread. It meant returning to a program of the most severe, mind-numbing
regimentation in the ghastly New York City public schools after a summer of
idyllic unreality in the New Hampshire woods, where I went to a Lord of the
Flies type of summer camp. And so here I am, many decades later,
still uneasy as the final page of the August calendar flies away in a hot Santa
Ana wind, and a great hellfire closes in on the far eastern reaches of Los
Angeles, and the American money system falls into a peculiar limbo, and every
fifth person is out of work, or going bankrupt, or glugging down the seawater
of default, or being denied coverage by health insurance that he-or-she has already
shelled out ten grand for this year, or getting shot in a trailer park.
I was in Los Angeles for a few days last
week, as chance had it, marveling at the odd disposition of things there. I’ve been there many times over the
years, but you forget how overwhelmingly weird it is. Altogether the LA metro
area has the ambience of a garage the size of Rhode Island where someone
happened to leave the engine running.
To say that LA is all about cars is kind of like saying the Pacific
Ocean is all about water. But one
forgets the supernatural scale of the freeways, the tsunamis of vehicles, the
cosmic despair of the traffic jams.
The vistas of present-day LA make the Blade Runner vision of things look quaint in comparison.
You motor out of the LAX airport –
personally, I love the name “LAX” because it so beautifully describes the
collective ethos of the place – and you discover quickly that the taxi cab’s
windows are not that dirty,
it’s the air itself colored brown like miso soup. Going north on the 405 freeway, you see the looming Moloch
of the downtown skyline through the brown miso soup. And you begin to
understand why the products of the film industry are so fixated on the theme of
machine apocalypse. Downtown LA
looks like just such a gigantic machine as the FX crews would dream up, as if a
day will come when those gleaming mirrored office towers will pull themselves
out of the ground from their roots and begin lumbering, crunch crunch crunch,
north toward the Hollywood Hills seeking to exterminate the vile humanity
responsible for making the place what it is.
I happened to be camping out briefly in
West Hollywood, in a scene-ster hotel where tiny bubbles of show biz
mega-success wafted around amidst a background odor of failure, and an impossibly
thin line was drawn between being pampered and being asked to go die in the
gutter, please. The place is not
without a certain decorum. I couldn’t help but imagine how lovely Hollywood
must have been in, say, 1923, when 92 percent of all the hopeless crapola now
on the ground there had not yet been built, when there were no freeways, and
fewer cars than currently found in Lincoln, Nebraska, you could go out to the
Pacific Ocean on a “Big Red” streetcar, and on a clear day you could see from
La Cienga out to Mount Wilson, and the movie “industry” was like a college
theater department. What a fabulous giggle it must have all been – apart from
poor Fatty Arbuckle – in that romantic desert at the edge of the world.
The whole “Dream Factory” myth has become
such an awful cliché, but what remains interesting now is how it utterly
infected every other organ, byway, and lost corner of American life, to the
degree that the life of this nation became little more than a “narrative,” a
story-board, a montage of wishes superimposed over the harsher mandates of
reality. Hollywood now is a mere
cartoon of what Wall Street and Washington have turned into. We’re a civilization of fluff now,
riding on a river of toxic sludge.
I found Hollywood utterly exhausting. On morning walks down in the buzzard
flats below Sunset Boulevard you almost never saw a human being outside the
protective carapace of a car. I
think I was the only person who ever walked down Melrose Avenue this calendar
year. There were a lot of fresh
store vacancies in the endless one-story strips, as if the retailers had just
packed up and left Dodge under the cover of night. There were obvious, if lame, attempts to pedestrianize the
major surface boulevards with fancy crossing pavements, but traffic flowed on
them at sixty off the rush hours, and you felt like a marmot in a buffalo
stampede out there. For solace, I
listened to Bruce Molsky sing “I Ride an Old Paint” on the iPod. The fiddle part is lovely.
The city of Los Angeles, indeed the whole
state of California, seems exhausted too. Apocalypse is probably such a rich
theme out there precisely because everything about that particular way of life
seems to be nearing its end – whether it’s the fiscal fiasco or the water
supply, or the aerospace economy, or the music industry, or the once-great
university system, or the Happy Motoring fantasy of cruising for burgers in
what Tom Waits called the dark, warm narcotic American night. I
went to the movies there one hot afternoon – Tarantino’s latest, Inglourius
Basterds, a completely crazy but
enjoyable revenge romp against Hitler & Co. – and before the feature, they
showed a “trailer” for Roland Emmerich’s forthcoming apocalyptathon. 2012, in which virtually every global landmark from the
Vatican to the White House is destroyed, and mankind’s last hope is John Cusack
riding a spaceship to worlds unknown….
If that isn’t shooting your wad as a movie-maker, I’m not sure what is. Maybe next time out, Roland will step
back and make a movie about a puppy.
I had my fill of apocalypse by the time I
left the place, only to find myself back in a real nation really dissolving
into a puddle of goo. In the
strange new ether of the Web, a consensus grows that we’re in for a rocky
autumn, as if the signal event will be something like a hurricane of shoes
dropping – bank failures galore, repudiation of US debt instruments by
America’s former patrons, foreclosures to the farthest horizon, jobs and
incomes terminated, and all the good intentions of the folks in charge coming
to naught in the face of historic forces.
We’re off to that kind of a start this morning, with the Dow dropping
eighty points and the news that Disney Inc has just paid four billion for the
rights to the Marvel Comics posse – Spiderman and his homeys. As if America needs more childish
fantasy.