As some of you will know, I'm the
author of a book titled Walking In Ruins. Sales have been, let's say, modest. In fact I
actually like the cover very much, but maybe it would have done better with an
illustration like this:
Friday, May 1, 2015
Monday, April 27, 2015
WALKING IN CONCRETE
I was in San Francisco for a couple of days last week, and of course I did
some walking while I was there. I know
the city somewhat but I often end up doing the same old things, so this time I (and
the Loved One) set out walking to a couple of places I’d never been before, the
Peace Pagoda in Japantown and the Villancourt Fountain in Justin Herman Plaza
near the downtown waterfront. Neither is
exactly obscure bit they’re not must-see destinations either.
The Peace Pagoda is in the Peace Plaza, part of the Japan Center complex, a cluster of Japanese shops
and restaurants. It was designed by the
architect Yoshiro Taniguchi and was a gift presented to San
Francisco in 1968 by Osaka, a “sister city” and the place where several members of Acid Mothers Temple come from.
The Peace Plaza is a big open paved space
between two malls, and although apparently it’s often the scene of concerts and
festivals, not much was going on when I was there: a couple of toddlers running
around under close parental supervision and a couple of Asian girls taking
selfies with the pagoda in the background.
Well, sure. I rather liked the
Peace Pagoda, for all that it’s part of an ancient tradition, but made of
concrete and it also looks a bit World’s Fair, a bit retro-futuristic. Who doesn’t like that?
And a small, curious thing I noticed around
Japantown, there were a number of signs for bars and restaurants that had
graphics of martini glasses outside. And
this was something I’d seen before in other parts of the city. San Francisco seems to have more martini signs
than any other city I’ve ever been in, and believe me I notice these things. Perhaps there’s a small monograph to be
written here. But we didn’t stop for a
martini, we went on to the Vaillancourt Fountain.
That empty, unused, paved expanse of the
Peace Plaza looked to have a lot in common with the Justin Herman Plaza. It’s also big and empty and people carefully
walk around the edges, leaving the center vacant. Maybe they’re keeping well away from the
Villancourt Fountain, a magnificent, brutal, concrete folly, and a controversial
one in certain circles. One Lloyd
Skinner, described as an “art connoisseur” said that the fountain was
"Stonehenge, unhinged, with plumbing troubles," but he seemed to
think that was a bad thing.
Judging its qualities is currently made harder
by the fact that the fountain is now dry.
Huge quantities of water were supposed to crash through the concrete
tubes 30,000 US gallons per minute, one reads, and this did, apparently, make a prodigious noise. But the fountain is expensive to run and in a
time of California drought maybe a giant water feature just doesn’t sit well
with locals.
As you see can probably see, the
structure contains various ramps and platforms, creating places you could stand
and watch the waters from above and even in their midst, but that’s no longer
possible. Even if there were any water, those
ramps and platforms are all barricaded off now.
There’s quite a lot of back
story to the fountain. Designer Armand
Vaillancourt, a French Canadian, sprayed “Quebec Libre” on the concrete of the fountain right before it was opened, and then
in 1987 U2 played a concert there and Bono (can that man do nothing right?)
sprayed "Rock N Roll Stops The Traffic" on it, which pissed off just
about everybody except Vaillancourt who is clearly one of nature’s genuine subversives,
and also a very sharp dressed man. That's him below.
Anyway there’s no sign of this aesthetic struggle now – and since
there’s no water running, and no noise, very few people seem to pay the fountain any mind
but this lack of water does mean you can walk right into it.
Kids seem to really like it, as a kind of adventure playground without
too much risk of injury. And I liked it
too, and found myself drawn in.
Of course as you walk under the mighty concrete arms you can’t help
thinking that if water were to come shooting out through the cavities at
unpredictable intervals, that would be truly adventurous, but the powers that
be in SF aren’t quite that subversive.
Anyway, by this time I was feeling in
need of the “silver bullet”. As the signs
prove, there are a great many paces to get a martini in this town but I only
really considered one of them, John’s Grill, beloved by Dashiell
Hammett and making an appearance in The
Maltese Falcon.
And you know, I was a little reluctant to
go there, a little scared of being disappointed. John’s was the place where I drank my first
ever American martini, and it holds a mythic spot in my life, but what if it
didn’t live up to my own personal mythology?
Anyway I risked it. I was a fool
to have worried. It was about 4.30 on a Saturday
afternoon, the place was dark and cool, and by no means empty, but there was only
one person sitting at the small bar. I
had my martini, the Loved One had a gimlet – and it was all pretty much perfect.
Drinking in the afternoon can always be a risky
thing, but this time it worked, we walked out of John’s with out spirits lifted
and a spring in our step. We also knew
that we were almost certainly walking in the footsteps of Hammett, who was
surely one of the sharpest dressed men ever to slouch in front of a typewriter
or indeed walk the mean streets.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
THE ETIQUETTE OF GARY
“How true it is that if men strive to
walk in the way of truth and uphold righteousness, fame will follow of itself.”
The above is a line from Basho’s text,
generally known as The Narrow Road to the
Deep North. It was on my mind over
the weekend because I saw Gary Synder do a poetry reading at the Los Angeles
Times Book Festival, where he referred to Basho’s work as The Narrow Trails to the Back Country, which sounds like a translation
of a very different color.
Snyder was born in 1930 and after Lawrence
Ferlinghetti he is, I think, the last of the Beats, and I confess that I regarded
this reading as something of a “last chance to see.” I also didn’t know what
shape he’d be in; to which the answer, I now know, is “Probably better shape than
you and me.” I think he’s probably the
best poetry reader I’ve even seen and heard. And I don’t think I’m just being sentimental
towards the old guy.
Snyder makes an appearance in Iain
Sinclair’s book American Smoke. Sinclair
goes to visit him in at his 100 acre estate in the
Sierra foothills, north of Nevada City (Allen
Ginsberg and Dick Baker were co-owners at one time, but he bought them out), Sinclair describes Snyder as a poet, bioregionalist, teacher …
skier, climber, trail walker.
One of Snyder’s poems is titled “A Walk.” It’s easily available in its entirety online, but it
begins like this:
Sunday
the only day we don't work:
Mules
farting around the meadow,
Murphy fishing,
The tent
flaps in the warm
Early
sun: I've eaten breakfast and I'll
Take a walk
To
Benson Lake. Packed a lunch,
Goodbye.
Sinclair suggests that the younger Snyder
may have been a little less lovable than the current one appears to be. From the 1950s onward he made trips to Japan
to study Zen Buddhism. Sinclair writes.
“The novice monk insisted that his future wife clear her credit-card
debt, which had climbed to $1000, before she travelled out to join him. On
arrival, she discovered a list Snyder had compiled, numbering her faults and
the ways she could improve. The big difference in Japan, Snyder explained, was
the necessity of having the right manners.
“His fourth wife, Carole
Lynn Koda, was Japanese-American. But in Japan, she got everything wrong. ‘I walked
too fast,’ she said. ‘I swung my arms too much. My stride was too long. I
looked at people in the eye. That marked me out as American right away.’”
My
life being the glamorous rollercoaster it is, I got to meet Gary Snyder back
stage (meet as in a chance for me to shake his hand and say, “I really enjoyed your
reading”). And I was, I admit, star
struck. My mouth and my brain weren’t very well connected and I found myself rambling
on about the Iain Sinclair piece.
“Oh yeah,” said Snyder, “that
was a funny piece”
I think he meant it in a good way.
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
WALKIN' A YELLOW BRICK ROAD
I always feel ambivalent about visiting
the sites of murders, death houses, scenes of long ago violent crimes. Partly it’s because of my inherent squeamishness. If there actually is some remaining malevolent
aura there, I’d rather not be around it.
And just as important, I don’t want to revel in and be entertained by the deaths of others, nor
to make light of pain, whether that of victims or survivors.
Yet I know one can protest too much about
these things. There’s no denying the frisson that comes with walking through,
say, Dealey Plaza in Dallas, or for that matter past the Bloody Tower in
London. I think the frisson is
imaginative rather than supernatural, but nonetheless real for that. One way or another a kind of shamanism is
involved, raising the spirits of the dead, but equally a kind of dubious
tourism is involved too
I don’t feel a whole let less ambivalent,
though in a different way, about visiting the homes where my “heroes” once
lived, even if I seem to have done plenty of it. In recent years I’ve found myself visiting JG
Ballard’s house in Shepperton, HG Wells’s in Woking, Raymond Chandler’s many
Los Angeles homes.
Of course when I say “visiting” I simply mean
that I walked down the street and stood around outside the building. I don’t go in for knocking on doors to interview
the current inhabitants, although I know some who do. My friend Anthony Miller, aka the Dark Sage of Sawtelle, recounts disturbing the tenants of Thomas Pynchon’s old apartment in
Manhattan Beach, and found the occupant, a surferish dude, amazingly hospitable. He invited him and let him look around. A Swiss film crew had been there not long
before, the one that made Thomas
Pynchon: A Journey Into the Mind of P.
The objection here is not that it’s
intrusive, but rather that it’s no big deal.
These are homes much like any other.
Everybody lives somewhere, lives don’t vary nearly as much as some
people like to think, and houses and appartments are not always totally fascinating. And in my experience there’s seldom any kind
of lingering aura, even if there may occasionally be a plaque.
Having said all that, and with all my
reservations, when I recently connected a couple of dots of information than
had been floating in my head for a while, and realized that the childhood home
of Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, was in the same street where the
Manson murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianco took place, well, you couldn’t
call yourself a psychogeographer if you didn’t take a walk down that street,
could you?
Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band were
really the first act that completely excited me in my difficult but dull
youth. They seemed subversive, poetic,
avant-garde, extremely cool – all the things I wanted to be. These days it seems to me that there were times
when Beefheart put rather too much effort into buffing his image as the
unschooled, sui generis genius born out of nothing, but I’ve had a few decades
to think about that. At the time the freaky
image was part of the attraction, and no doubt in some sense necessary for the
grand project.
Of course we also tended to think he was
some crazy guy straight out of the Mojave desert: we knew that he came from
Lancaster where he was best friends, later less so, with Frank Zappa. But before he was a desert rat he lived in
Los Angeles, at 3467 Waverly Drive, in the northeast corner of Los Feliz, a thoroughly
pleasant suburban enclave right below Griffith Park; a great place to bring up
kids then and now, you might think.
We also know that while he was at that
address he was schooled, at least to the extent of attending art classes at the
Griffith Park Zoo, where he was taught by a Portuguese artist named Agostinho Rodrigues. When he was
10 years old Little Don Vliet (he wasn’t even van Vliet at that time, much less
the Captain) won first prize in a 1951 sculpture competition run by the parks
and recreation department, and made it into the local paper with his model of a
polar bear. The contest was monthly, and
I don’t know how big the class it was, so winning it may not have been the
greatest honor, though his polar bear looks just fine.
There are a few pictures of the lad from
this period but I’ve never seen any of the family’s house, so I don’t know if
the current 3467 Waverly Drive looks anything like the way it did back in
1951. As far as that goes, I don’t know whether
Don’s parents had the whole house or just part of it. I’d assume the latter. In the current configuration 3467 is the right
half of the house, 3469 is the left half, and I think there are more than two dwellings
in there. When you peer round the side
it looks as though the building’s been extended to make a small apartment block,
though I’d guess the changes have been made post-1951.
Waverley Drive is a long street but the young
Don surely walked its length, in which case he’d have gone right past the LaBianca
house. At that time it would have been
owned by the previous LaBianca generation, Antonio, who founded Gateway Markets and the State Wholesale
Grocery Company. It wasn’t till 1968
that the son Leon, who by then was running the family business, bought the house from his mother and moved in
with Rosemary his second wife.
Photographs of the couple suggest they weren’t
much influenced by alternative culture, but Lord knows there were some
divergent energies abroad in Los Angeles at the time. Even in this quiet suburban enclave, the LaBiancas’
neighbor, one Harold True, had thrown an “LSD party”, and some of the Manson
family attended. The day after they’d
committed the Tate murders up on Cielo Drive, Manson instructed his followers to
kill again. They might easily have
selected a different house and different victims, and if things had played out
just a little differently the LaBiancas wouldn’t even have been home. They they’d been to pick up Rosemary’s
daughter Suzanne from Lake Isabella and had thought of staying there overnight
but decided to come back late Saturday night rather than the following morning.
Manson had found the Tate killings needlessly
chaotic, and to show his followers how it was done, he went into the house and
tied up the LaBiancas with the minimum of fuss, so that the killings could be
done in a nice orderly fashion. I’ve
done my best not to become a Manson obsessive, but if you need a full account
of the events, I reckon Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter
Skelter is still the best.
Photographs from the time show the La
Bianca house to have been remarkably accessible and vulnerable – a long straight
driveway, no gates, the house visible and inviting at the top of the hill, yet a
fair way from the street.
Some things are noticeably different at
the house these days; the street number’s been changed for one thing, though
that’s hardly bought them much privacy.
There’s now a gate across the entrance to the property, and you can see
that a large separate garage with a second curving driveway has been built
between the house and the street, at the very least providing protection from
prying eyes, though not inevitably from Google.
It still looks like a very nice house in a
very nice neighborhood. Would I
personally want to live in it, given its history? I suppose not, but if there price was right;
everything’s negotiable.
Charles Manson famously said to an interviewer:
My eyes are cameras. My mind is tuned to more television channels than exist in your world. And it suffers no censorship. Through it, I have a world and the universe as my own. So...know that only a body is in prison. At my will, I walk your streets and am right out there among you.
My eyes are cameras. My mind is tuned to more television channels than exist in your world. And it suffers no censorship. Through it, I have a world and the universe as my own. So...know that only a body is in prison. At my will, I walk your streets and am right out there among you.
Captain Beefheart once sang:
my baby walked just like she did
walking
on hard-boiled eggs with a --
there's
a --
she
can steal them
-
oh, I ain't blue no more, I said lord,
oh, I ain't blue no more, I said lord,
Words to live by.
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