G21 - CultureCast "Waxing Retrograde Again"

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Waxing Retrograde Again

by JENNIFER BLUE

G21 Staff Writer

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Event #162: Aloft the Moonmare

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LOS ANGELES - "The first thing God created was the Journey.
Then came doubt; then nostalgia." -- The Journalist from the film To Vlemma tou Odyssea (The Gaze of Odysseus).

Lately I am resisting a persistent trance-state while residing in southern California. Successful hypnosis is often achieved through repetition of visual stimuli such as flickering lights. The southern California landscape once induced somnolence through its golden, tepid aura, now it hypnotizes through repetitious community facades that flicker and chant like a rallying cult. One town resembles the next town which mimics the town before it; virtual existence spreads its sameness across the already prone-to-fantasizing ambiance. This is the place that spawned Hollywood and Disneyland, they of contrived sets, situations and characters. There once existed a barrier, a moat of sobering cold water between virtual effects and real life. I always believed that real life could infiltrate and disrupt the amusement park before the amusement park could infiltrate and disrupt real life because the realities of life thrust more weight of substance, more fierceness of power, more edges and angles of unpredictability. I forgot to consider the subtle yet potent seduction factor that virtuality wields. I forgot that the most successful marketing is bedecked with capricious lighting, attractive props, savory musical scores, enticing characters and, ultimately, mass mesmerization.

The differences

that once distinguished southern California communities is becoming blurred and wavy. I feel as if I am trapped with an old and dear friend that has received a lobotomy and a face-lift. This friend and I have shared significant life events and transitions in the past. Some of these events were glorious, some were wretched, too many of them are indelibly etched into my viscera. We could share more experiences, but this is unlikely as her memory and soul were castrated when her lobes were clipped. Her face is too smooth, pretty and vacuous; the distinctive wrinkles and nodes of her expressions and experiences have been stretched out of the mind's eye. Her face now eerily resembles the face of all the other patients that her cosmetic surgeon has torqued and sanded. Her lack of memory, her expertly shaped facial expression of blank animation only succeed in sharpening and deepening the mnenomical images of us within my interior. When I sit with her I find myself suddenly slipping into drooling, timeless jags of reverie that fill the eerie, blank space between us.

Many southern California communities

now resemble many other southern California communities. Main drags have been converted into cute and emasculated consumer paradises. Non-productive businesses, cafs, shops and homes have been duly amputated, enabling streets to better resemble each other like monotonous brush strokes across a scrubbed canvas. Productivity is key; in southern California there is little tolerance for preserving non-productive landmarks, altars and relics. See the ATM machines breed and teasingly wink. Watch the corporate coffee shops feign retrograde notions (i.e. "The Safety Beatnik:" the aesthetics of the hipster Beatnik movement are extant but the subversive, spontaneous life of the Beatnik aorta is essentially extinct). Observe how many of the people are indistinguishable from each other. Woe to the designer garbage receptacles that overfloweth with discarded, bucket-sized, beverage containers. Virtual facades have usurped the unique flavor of many independent communities. This trend of sprawling neo-liberal surgery appears so hip and yes diverse yet it lacks the true soul of diversity in that differentness receives an eager nod of approval as long as we all conduct ourselves within narrowing parameters of behavior. It used to be that art imitated life, now life increasingly imitates advertising, marketing and the tightening screws of zero-tolerance attitudes, civil-life legislation and tort law.

I am doubtful.

The presentation is too slick, the strides toward strict idealism are too anxious. As each community is re-developed the costs and regulations increase for those that wish to conduct business and reside within its newly manufactured ambiance. The riffraff, eccentric and underproductive undesirables are repelled into fringe areas (or prisons) that have not yet been seized by cosmetic alterations and ridden by developers that wield sharp spurs that quicken lifestyle modification. The luscious variance of people that once co-existed within a community is cleansed, rendering the turf a saccharine-fix for those who can afford to feed on it. An idealism is achieved, kindred consumers unite, and the unsavory aspects of life that cause discomfort (and eyesores) cease to exist in these landscapes of safe predictability.

Virtual landscapes

are as frenetic and secure as Main Street in Disneyland or a perky advertisement in a lifestyle magazine, yet at the same time nothing of value is really happening other than the placating of unreal puritan urges. The presence of organic oddities, strangeness and passionate differences are no longer direct experiences that test our humanity. Rather they are feckless foes that are either exiled to a safe distance from the eyes of the skittish and tired beholder or they are manipulated into soul-less facades through advertising campaigns. I am waiting for the appearance of Che Guevara cologne. His notorious image will be serigraphed on peculiar-shaped bottles; a dash of Che! will arouse the revolutionary within you (consumers get a free beret with a $40.00 purchase). The aesthetics are there but I am doubtful that the true spirit and mission of Che Guevara would be tolerated.

Without real experiences,

I become doubtful. When I become doubtful, my nostalgia sharpens its focus and strengthens its effects as past events offer me solid indication of who I am and what I am becoming. I feel old; my memories are stubborn. I must resemble a gap-toothed crone, slapping her knee as she becomes giddy while sharing the folklore of southern California.

I recently visited Hermosa Beach

and became distressed when confronted with the community overhaul. Most of the comforting landmarks that I had become accustomed to in my youth have been removed and replaced by more productive, upscale fronts and denizens. The distinctive uvre that this community once emitted frequently provided the background of some of my more significant life shifts, careens, accelerations and crashes. Most of the doors of abodes remained open in the summer inviting visitation. Carousing and raucous young people co-existed with families and the elderly, their shared desire to exist on the beach fused their unity. Surfers and naked children lolled on the wet sand of the shore. Freakish and unphotoworthy dogs that were missing an eye or a leg sunned their bellies and chased birds. The local schizophrenic occasionally performed odd somersaulting through beach soires. The cars that lined the streets were dented squarebacks and microbuses, their epidermal layers dulled quiet from the merciless blare of the California sun.

The aura of Hermosa Beach was once so irresistibly reflective of my own hall of mirrors that my first paramour and I rented a bungalow in Hermosa Beach. Today I wince at the rental prices in Hermosa Beach. Postscript: the set of four bungalows where I resided have been razed. What now sits in that lot is a tight-fitting, claustrophobia-inciting two story building which ultimately houses at least three times as many people as when I resided there. The monstrosity is painted in calm, beachy hues as if to convince the onlooker of its developmental benevolence. Its Goliath presence menacingly overshadows the other teeny, not-yet-redeveloped houses on the small, intimate street. The comparatively larger girth of rental income that the monster exhibits is probably persuading its land-owning neighbors to follow suit in the current trend of behemoth-is-better. This is extraordinarily productive land development.

Today Hermosa Beachian doors of abodes

are closed. Shiny SUV's and BMW's hug the curbs and tiny driveways. There are no more three-legged dogs urinating on the tire of your tired car; gone are the naked children lolling on the wet sand of the shore. The overt aroma of cannabis has been duly extinguished; the volume of life has been duly muted. The local schizophrenic is a myth. All is under control. Hermosa Beach is now a productive, economically robust, ersatz funky beach pueblo.

As I slip along the southern California sprawl like a rock skimming the surface of a spreading oily lake, my vision becomes blurred in dj vu's; the same exterior packaging slides by like pert animation backgrounds; the same corporate stores and their enthusiastic imitators prolifically spread their presence like fingers reaching toward a point of retail infinity. The same collection of mass-produced music resonates through all the shops. Who compiles these themed collections of tunes? I conjure images of a pony-tailed man with a receding hairline who wears a paisley shirt. This pony-tailed, paisley'd guy has a big hand in defining our ambiances. Who the hell does he think he is?

While I sense Marx and Marcuse

are writhing within their graves at such a debauched display of control via capitalism, my own right-winging DNA is disoriented and bereft. I am of right-winging genes that embrace the ideologies of "Mind your own business," and "Hot damn, Anything is possible." While L/liberatarian impulses rip through my gonads and veins, I am not as heartened as I should be amidst such supposedly robust economic times. More money, theoretically, begets more options for more people. Yet I feel cornered and manipulated. I toss myself into potential events that could potentially emboss themselves into my viscera, but these are usually carefully planned situations that lack the pulse for anything more than diversion.

So I, of rose-colored-heart-shaped-spectacles (my navet would comprise a tome), wait for a turning point, an alignment that will accept my own creative antics and thrusts.

I am eager for new experiences, experiences that will arouse my nostalgic tendencies in the future. "I am eager!" I shout between cupped hands as I twirl a dervish on the pavement of what could be any re-developed town in southern California. A woman walks by me, she is pushing a chirpless, hi-tech pram; both mother and child avert their eyes from my friendly eyebrow wiggling. Most people don't have the time or tolerance for my nonsense anymore; perhaps the experiences I seek are in Paris as much spontaneous and mutual eyebrow wiggling occurred when I recently visited the City of Lights.

I miss reality.

Virtual scenes are manufactured for purposes of escape. If real day-to-day life is modified and manipulated into an escape mechanism, then where are we supposed to go to experience the ultimately undeniable textures of real life? Life is not an amusement park. People have a right to wrestle with existential trial and error. People have problems that defy economic solutions and economic solutions can often create problems such as "my apartment building/business is being amputated and I can no longer afford to be here."

I must congratulate the re-development success of southern California communities. For all intents and purposes they are thriving according to the current definition of thriving. They are productive, generally safe and amusing; they have chosen to re-define and enforce their identity and they have succeeded like trend-setting Huns. I will have to solve my nostalgic quandaries, perhaps through primal scream therapy. Their homogenous formula of success is reflected across the land, attracting money and insinuating the changes that money can achieve. Soon, the entire planet may be swathed in this successful formula of lively, homogenous re-development; interesting cultural differences will be erased, we will be comforted by a sense of continuity.

WalMarts have been erected in South America; will my next excursion to Incan Ruins include the presence of a WalMart? All that undeveloped space is beckoning pioneers of productivity. Will the guerrillas of Colombia give up their struggle in order to sell Celine Dion CD's and Titanic videos within the bowels of a Bogot Walmart? StarBucks is now exerting itself into Mideast and China; soldiers can sip on a Mocha while bombing the shit out of Iraq ("make that Mocha 'to go'"); Chinese residents can swirl espresso on their tongues while plotting and/or subverting dissent in Beijing ("make that Dopio 'to go'").

Lately I wear protective amulets

and pinch myself when I feel a trance-state caressing the skin of my psyche. My nostalgic hauntings tend to strengthen their presence in such lively dead space. In such robust times I am too easily seduced by ghosts.

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