Greetings from sunny North Hollywood, California. I got on the plane a few days ago feeling miserable with a cold, lamenting the fact that the summer is now too remote to feel at all in New York. My flight itself was incredibly unpleasant with turbulence, and upon landing, I was saddened beyond words to see rain, and temperatures as low in LA as they were in NYC.
But alas, what a difference 3 days make!! I am sitting out in the sun enjoying the breeze and the wonderful sting of warm sun on Nordic skin! My cold hung with me as long as the freakish rain and cold in LA did, and then, with the first rays of the sun, I felt the first starch return to my wobbling legs.
Indeed, it took awhile to feel better, and there were some visitation casualties. Primary among them was my inability to get out to the Western Wear store I love here in the Valley; this in turn meant I also missed my favorite little LA restaurant, Daichan, which is just a few blocks down from the Western Wear store. Sadly as well, I was unable to spend the kind of quality time in Amoeba that I normally would. I literally went in, filled as much of my list as I could, and I headed out. I was hurtin. By that time it really had been a few days since I was able to hold any food down, or even try. Things were bleak. My itinerary for this visit seemed to be in danger of dissolving like so many creative endeavors in the City of Angels.
I believe in my heart that it was the return to the sun that brought things around to where they are, but there is more. Much more. Critical to this narrative was the recommendation – nay, pleading - of a few friends to finally make my maiden voyage to Tommy’s Hamburgers.
“Wait!” you protest, “You go on and on about cutting down on meat eating; you go on and on about being continuously sick, and yet you decide that you will attempt to redeem body and soul with a cheeseburger of infamy?”
Verily, your protestation has indeed shone the harsh disinfectant of sunlight upon one of my numerous and deeply-nuanced shortcomings; I will not begrudge you your scorn. Yet, before you resolve to eternally assign the mention of my name a furrowed brow and involuntary chuff, I beseech that ye look within yer own soul, and see how bitterly your own circumstances would have turned had you never once defied all convention, all logic, all custom, all creed – nary, even your own creed, sworn as if a battle-spawned oath to the heavens – in order to follow the call sent out by a yearning heart in a moment of tornadic desire…yea though that desire may be bathed in chili, hot with grease, anathema to the colon.
I called an audible and did the least sensible thing possible: I ate the greasiest chili-cheeseburger I have ever seen while rather sick. Somehow I knew it was the elixir I needed. Don’t ask me how. I just knew that a successful Tommy’s session would be the turning point for me, and I am convinced that it indeed was. It may indeed highlight for science an eternal paradox; and certainly, that which normally would make me sick indeed made me well.
I was able to recover in time to spend an awesome Halloween weekend out and about. I went to the dia de los muertos thing in the Hollywood Forever cemetery, which was quite freaky. Rebekka del Rio was there in person singing her version of Roy Orbison’s Crying, which is haunting enough, let alone in a candle-lit cemetery. Many of the Mexican death shrines were quite interesting. I suppose the mainstream American culture instinctively recoils at any custom or gesture that dare treat death with any levity; however, once you see the way other culture’s are able to incorporate emotions other than solemnity and overt grief, it becomes much easier to do so yourself. I have decided to no longer be so sour about it all.
Actually, that is an exaggeration of sorts, I am not always sorrowful at death and such; but I am overly superstitious. I imagine ghosts hovering in graveyards. Presences. I imagine they can read my thoughts, so I try to send nice ones. When I pass a national cemetery I say “thank you boys” in my mind, for example. Of course, there are ladies in there, and I say thanks to them too, but the site of military graves, laid as they are, the first thought in my mind is of WWII era draftees heading out on troop trains, coming back as war dead, suspended for eternity as they were: boys. Again, this is a personal and superstitious ritual of mine. In regular cemeteries, seeing a child’s grave causes me to imagine that the soul remains a child in heaven, or as a hovering ghost near the grave. Why should the dead – assuming they have gone to “a better place”, for example – remain as they were? Why would they not also grow, evolve, change, or age as we do? Would a 20 year old farm boy of WWII vintage find eternal paradise remaining 20?
I can’t imagine myself being content that way, so naturally, I cannot imagine anyone else being content with it either. I guess if I presume there is some alternate dimension reserved for the eternal pleasure of the well-behaved dead, then a cemetery would be the right place to do a little celebrating. The sting of losing a loved one is spread out much more evenly across life than somber cemetery visits suggest, at least for me. Why bundle your grief there? There isn’t anything bad happening there!
Of course, pondering these things on Halloween in Hollywood comes with some baggage. Certainly, one doesn’t receive any sensory depravation in which to do any real thinking. One has to think about the big things in life/death while some dude wearing little more than chaps and mustache wax fills your line of sight, sipping a margarita with his top in front of Douglas Fairbanks Junior’s sarcophagus. This is an exaggeration of course, but not dramatically far off. Such things may be a bit of a buzz-kill if you are pondering the big things in life, but on this evening, it served as good prep for the evening capper: seeing a Halloween show by The Cramps in Hollywood.
I have liked The Cramps for many many years. My senior video project in high school was to do my own rock video by getting a few of the girls in my class to lip-synch to The Cramps song Get Off The Road whilst standing atop my dad’s 1981 Chevy Impala station wagon in the student parking lot in Marion, Iowa. In fact, The Cramps Kizmiaz 12” single was the first record I ever bought simply because I liked the cover. I didn’t know the song, nor did I know their music all that well, but I loved that record sleeve…I loved the whole Cramps design ethic. They looked great and they created their own archetype without ever becoming a self-parody. Kizmiaz, Goo Goo Muck, Two-Headed Sex Change, How Far Can Too Far Go?, plus all the great covers they did: Georgia Lee Brown, Muleskinner Blues, Surfin Bird…all awesome. They preceded the first B-52s album by several years, working with no less than Alex Chilton long before it was super cool to do so, and stayed cool.
I was a little worried at how they might perform given the fact that Lux has to be pushing 60 at this point. These fears were quickly laid to rest. They played their hearts out and gave an incredible show. Ivy is the most under-rated guitarist going. She has such a thorough mastery of the primordial language of rock-n-roll that I think there is probably very little she couldn’t do with the form if asked. Lux gives his all, but Ivy is the nerve center of it all…everything flows from what she did with her big ol’ Gretsch guitar (I think it was the ‘Country Gent’ model!) I think she writes a ton of their material to boot. She is totally awesome, and I dare say, belongs in the rock-n-roll hall of fame. She just stands there, holding that guitar like it wants to run away from her and must therefore be restrained. How it is that Brian Setzer became the poster child for rockabilly to the wider world while Ivy is out doing what she does, I will never understand (which isn’t to say Brian sucks – Runaway Boys and Knife Feels Like Justice were cool.) Anyway, I have always wanted to see a Halloween show by the Cramps, and I am not at all disappointed. Other than the fact that they didn’t play What’s Inside A Girl?, I couldn’t have asked for more.
The show was a part of a wider kind of Hollywood Freak Halloween party. Freaky though it was, I must say, no one – not even New York – has San Francisco beat for freakydeaky-ness. The Folsom Street Fair, and just plain old Halloween itself in San Fran is the pinnacle of the genre. Hollywood freakiness has a little more hetero bent to it, which is ok with me given my personal tastes. Having half-naked hotties dancing around like gypsies with ants in their pants provides me with nothing but pleasure.
I didn’t come back Sunday night to see the Hollywood Halloween Parade. I saw a little on TV and it seems to be pretty much what one would expect. I have seen the one in NYC over the years, and they don’t seem radically different. They seem radically similar.
To be honest, I think the whole counter-culture has gone stale. Body art, S&M accoutrements, recreational dabbling in same-sex encounters, drugs, “alternative lifestyles” all feel played out. Of course, these things are in no way obligated to meet my criteria for being a well-spring of new thinking, they have the right to be a product of the simple discretion of those who happen to like them. Even so, one has to suspend their disbelief to some degree to take all that in as if were just another way of doing things. It isn’t. There is such an undercurrent of darkness to it all. It is like watching someone laugh to keep from crying. At least it is for me. It is a feeling I have never been able to shake.
It took me awhile to unlearn being entirely judgmental about those things-unlike-MY-things, but I think I am most of the way there. I have reached a point where “live and let live” feels right for the most part, and ya simply go on living. However, I think about the Bob Dylan lyric in which he says that if you really think that no one’s choices are any better or worse than anyone else’s, then we really have nothing to win and nothing to lose. But we do have something to win. There are good reasons to change and evolve.
The Freak Parade is now as much a source of amusement for the people doing the ostracizing as it is for the ostracized. The secretary has a nose ring. The sales manager likes Rage Against The Machine. People who like Dave Matthews can’t wait to soak it all in…hell, they can’t wait to march! Theoretically it may not be constructive to demonize John Mayer fans, for example; but it is absolutely destructive to not at least speak the name of our society’s ills! I can’t get out and say “me too”! I can’t get out and say “ha ha, not you!” either. Can we get to a point where the thing that sucks, in this case the worst of American cultural conformity, is simply removed or ignored so thoroughly it is effectively gone? It doesn’t come up at the dinner table not just because it isn’t polite, but because no one is actually thinking about it anymore? The group identity is gone. The groupthink is over. There is only the individual as they are?
I suppose I shouldn’t hang around waiting for it to come. I will have to make-do by simply getting to that point for myself. Strange as it seems, it may prove that I am better able to do this in LA than NYC. While LA isn’t a bastion of fierce individualism by any means, I just personally happen to feel better mentally when I am there. I have an easier time connecting to the things I like and want.
One need not be a seer to pick up on the fact that I am seriously considering a move west. I really would like to move to LA. I am hung up on having to own a car, and the fact that LA is an environmental abomination. California is already being loved to death; does it need another body? Tough call.
This really is the first time I have been heading back to NYC and feeling a bit of dread about it. Maybe it was the fact that I was sick for the days leading up to my trip…laying in bed with hot and cold flashes, unable to turn the heat down (which, in NYC fashion was on full blast.) I dunno…I really don’t want to be going back to New York. I feel like I am kinda done with NYC finally. I love it, and have loved it a lot, but I am starting to feel quite sour. I can’t just get up and go though as that is what I always do, and eventually I need to let the restlessness go.
Sour, restless, sad, or not, I am homeward bound. We shall see.