Internal and External perceptions of LA

"I just want to be in a swimming pool, eating tacos and signing autographs" - "The Smithereens" the movie one of the down and out character's says about moving to LA while living in a scummy basement apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

They say that when you visit Venice, Italy you need to arrive at it by the sea.  Venice is a magical place where all your romantic impressions from movies and history come true.  And this perception is solidified if you literally approach it properly. I, on the other hand, arrived to Venice for the first time by train.  Which means I passed through Mestre before I got to Venice.  Actually, my hostel was in Mestre and I stopped off and walked around that city for a couple hours before departing for Venice.  If Venice is a magic dreamland then Mestre is an industrial nightmare.  Most cities have a mix of "nice" qualities and necessary, but "ugly" qualities, but when faced with a place that needs to exist as a fiction then all the necessary aspects of it get shoved into a nearby area and the local commerce tries as much as possible to get visitors to ignore it.  Or sometimes, like in the case of North Vegas, be afraid of it.
Still, I was absolutely glad I went through Mestre and got a chance to see what a completely rejected working class construction zone was like where there is practically nothing "nice" or "beautiful" about the entire place.  I guess it might seem strange, but I have never really agreed with most of society on these terms of "beauty", "good", "prosperity", etc.  Often I find things that are supposed to look beautiful to actually look very ugly and visa verse.  This particularly true with modern architecture.  As one of the last created cities on earth Los Angeles as some of the most diverse architecture and it can change dramatically within a span of 10 feet.

One of the most apt and concise descriptions of the conundrum of LA I found in a somewhat creative bureaucratic text book from 1955 titled  The Metropolis: Is Integration Possible? which is part of the series Metropolitan Los Angeles - A Study in Integration [the entire book is quite facinating because it give eloquent and complex descriptions for a purpose that is clearly supposed to be quite dry given chapters titled "Local Governments - Your Concern", "Water Supply - Your Heritage", "Protective Forces - Your Safety", etc]:

"Los Angeles and its environs are many things to many people.  The metropolis spreads out across the coastal plain and its surroundings valleys in a turning areas, farm lands and orchards, industrial centers and oil fields.  No other metropolitan area in the United States, or perhaps even the world, is so diversified and decentralized.  Consider the dilemma of the visitor from New York or Chicago who is completely at a loss because he can find no particular place to pause, as in Time Square or The Loop, and say to himself, 'This is Los Angeles'."

With such a short history as a city Los Angeles approaches itself in a very "modern" way.  If cities were humans who had personalities then Los Angeles reached adolescence and its most influential time period in the 1950's.  The biggest explosion of the cinema industry, automobiles, suburbs, microwave dinners and disposable products.  It is a disposable city.

How can a city express an adjective such as disposable? If you spend any time in virtually any city that is older then LA you quickly notice that there are a lot more older and classic buildings then in LA.  However, often, especially in California, many buildings are not necessarily older then LA, but they are much more cared for.  Simply spend some time in downtown Los Angeles and you can see a dozen buildings that are over 100 years old.  There are a few, like the Eastern Building, that are pristine and well cared for, elegant, beautiful and decadent.  However, there are hundreds of others that are decaying, rotting and falling apart.  Why?  It's quite easy.  Just like the City Market of LA (which I describe in a previous entry) many buildings in LA develop a certain amount of decay where it becomes more of a nuisance to repair then it is to destroy entirely and rebuild a new building entirely.  It a way it's a perpetual process.

Let's take a recent example at my armamada, the University of Southern California.  Just a few years ago they constructed a new Building for the Cinema School.  The Lucas building.  This was to replace the old Lucas building (both created from huge donations from, you guessed it, George Lucas).  The old building was only built sometime in the 80's, but just over 20 years later the University needed to fix so much in the building and, according to the Dean, there were so many new restrictions in relation to earthquake safety that it was cheaper and easier to just tear down that building and build a new one all together.  So, now the old building is just a memory.  It is disposable. Get rid of the old to make way for the new.  When the old is just out of style that it's an eyesore and just before it becomes beautiful again as a historic relic.

So, this is what real estate developers do.  They wait for a building to die, in a sense.  They want a building to become an eyesore (or become a hazard) in some cases for much older buildings that have a historic value to it.  That way they can bypass city laws forbidding destruction of historical landmarks.  It might take 5 or 10 years, but eventually they will have their way and the city looses more of it's historic culture and instead is replaced with the cookie cutter machine of big industry where everything should look the same. Every Walmart looks the same, every high rise, every 7-11 and eventually everything will look and be the same.

Enjoy it while we can.

Obituary for the LA City Market

For those who don't know. The most amazing complexes in the entire city of LA is the City Market of Los Angeles. This is the long giant two square block complex of loading docks that appears to be at least 80 years of age. Surrounded by San Pedro, 9th, 11th and San Julian streets the complex is one of the most negelected, over used and amazing constructs. More then anything this building represents the beauty of collective construction, neglect and pieced together necessity. More specifically the entire place was originally used for loading and unloading of goods. Huge trucks would move in and out during the peak of it's life time.  There were a few major accidents and thousands of minor accidents most were left as is and only a few times did the owners decide to try fix any damage done.

It was originally build to house businesses and make it easy for trucks, vans and other vehicles move in and out.  Chances are there were at least a few dozen deaths and maybe even one or two murders within the life of the premises.  It also appears that there there a few different parts of the building that once had extensions to it.  Therefore, there are some walls and doors that were once interior, but for some reason or other a part of the building needed to come down and now the wall or door was exposed to the outside world when it was not intended to.
The image to the right is a perfect example of a walk-in fridge door that was no longer in use and mix of laziness necessity to keep the door permanently closed someone decided to use a 2x4 to block it off and the need to mask the wall as much as possible by painting it the light camouflage green in order to conceal the door just enough so that people won't casually notice.  In a way this turns into that "truth is stranger than fiction" or I would call it "accident is more beautiful than art".  What artists in their right mind would even think of creating a door and even creating a door in such a fashion?  And yet I have never seen anything so beautiful.

So, now in it's latter years with an inch thick layer or rust and it's 10th coat of paint the owners have decided to tear it down.  It's age has reached the eclipsing point where the asphalt that was crudely added in the 60's or 70's has worn away enough for the elegant tiled brick ground to peak through and just a tiny amount of the old railway has shown through as well.  Now the complex if half gone.  The amazing Art Deco sign has turned in to a vulgar Billboard and the cranes have already ripped apart the entire north corridor of the complex.

In speaking with one of the owners I mentioned that this is one of my favorite places in LA he replied "Ya, but it's unsafe."  And it was the most obvious explanation that made me realize and masochism of my aesthetic appreciation.  Reason why I love this place is 1) because if has an old classic look to it (in a strange way it's like being in Italy - but this is a totally different time period) and 2) it's totally neglected.  There were hundreds of thousands of decisions that lead to people decided to clean something up either in a half-assed fashion or deciding not to fix something at all!  AND this is the very reason why it must be destroyed.  There is simply no way for this space to be usable and safe.  It's like an old dog that you love, but it's so old that it's body hurts by just existing.  You can't be so selfish to keep it around when it's in so much pain.  It must be euthanized.  Still, I'll always wish I had more time with it.

When I first saw that space I knew I wanted to have a crazy huge installation of art, video projections, DJ's - just one crazy huge festival of art and music. Certainly, the best time to visit is night. Unfortunately, that will have to be left to my dreams.

Good-bye, old friend.

Experimental Cinema is a Radicalizer

At what point in a career does one establish a rationale for experimental cinema?  How long after a medium’s formation is it still acceptable to describe its purpose?

There is no reason to limit a date of publication for logic.  The difficulty is that there is already much history of written text upon the subject and even upon this very topic.  The history of experimental cinema is equal in length to the history of cinema and now with well over 100 years of cinema there is also 100 years of cinema rhetoric.

However, just like everything it is subject to constant change, constant analysis and constant invention.  The most important concept to retain throughout this spilling out of ideas is, at the very least, an attempt to avoid reinventing the wheel.  I will start by stating that for as long as possible I will stick to the singular term “experimental cinema.”  Only so that I do not digress into the endless cycle of terminology semantics and nuances of “experimental,” “abstract,” “avant-garde.”  But rest assured I mean to use the term “experimental cinema” to encompass all these terms and more.  And, specifically for the purposes of this article, the limitations of the term are not defined by the writer, but by the reader and movie-goer.

Experimental cinema is a radicalizer.  By its very nature and function it has the potential to change people very extremely – to radicalize them.  How can this be?  How can such a passive recreation of cinema instigate such a shock?  Let’s set the scene, shall we.

It is an old scene. In fact, it is older then some societies, religions, cultures.  It is the cave analogy.  Whether Plato invented it or if it was indeed created by some figure named Socrates makes little difference now, but is now immortalized in the classic text The Republic.  It is a stage described many times again and again.  For our purposes it is quite apt.  It is really a very good description of what a cinema must have been like in the 3^rd Century BCE.  We start with a cave and in this cave we have individuals, let’s call them slaves because in Socrates mind they pretty much were.  These slaves are locked in a seated position and forced to stare at a wall.  They have restraints so that they are unable to move their heads.  Upon the wall are shadow and these shadows are created form a glowing fire, which is behind the slaves.  And in between the slaves and the fire are people, or projectionists - if you will, who pull out stocks of shapes – a horse, trees, cows, sheep, people, hills, buildings.  These shapes are brought up to where their shadow is brought into the filed of vision of the slaves and then removed, replaced by another shape, which is thusly removed and the cycle goes on.

The slaves are made to believe that this is the full scope and reality of the world.  Socrates invents this mythical world to describe the state of his world saying that the people who are marveled and praised are those who are like a slave that has a great skill of predicting correctly as to which shadow that will be the next to appear before it comes into view.  In his mind, a philosopher is damned with a punishment of knowledge because they are like a slave who is released and able to leave the cave and able to see the world as it truly is.  A freed slave who then returns to the cave describing to the other slaves what this real world is like and the fiction of their existence and their foolish guessing game is ridiculed as being delusional and crazy.  And Socrates continues to describe a world ruled by philosopher kings and the society they will create in a perfect world, which goes quite beyond our immediate needs at the current moment in relation to Experimental Cinema.

Let us take this scene and reverse it.  Not so much in it’s power structure nor it’s scenario, but within it’s linear structure.  We start with a free people. They wonder about this world their entire lives seeing the world as it is.  Over time they take it for granted, but still continue living.  At one point one individual enters a cave lead in by strange discolorations on the rocks that seem to have a shape or meaning.  They are lead further and further back until they find huge shadows upon the wall and a comfortable seat, which makes for easy viewing of these shadows.  At first the shadow catches their eye because it is moving, but they cannot make sense of it.  After some time they begin to realize that the shapes are representations.  It takes quite a bit of pondering and conjuring, but they eventually see the shapes as signifying of objects that they know from outside the cave.  Symbols, representations or abstracts that take some time to explore with one’s imagination in order to make the connection to the referential object.  These shadows deviate from their originals.  They are two-dimensional, without color, different in size, alternate design and they also bare some other characteristics that function in order to resemble the original, but through simplification.  For example, there is a figure, which is a circle with lines protruding directly out from it to represent the sun.  The original sun has no lines protruding from it, but the lines work as an abstract representation of rays of light extruding from the sun.

The forms of images begin as fairly representational.  Their shape is proportionally the same as the originals with only slight mental adjustments and explorations into personal imagination does the individual make sense of the shadows.  The shadows continue and the individual starts to realize there is a correlation between the images.  It is telling a story.  This story starts out realistic and after some time delves into an imaginary world where real objects are converted yet again so that they are harder to distinguish from their original.  Still after some pondering and analysis of these new shadows does the individual continue to distinguish the symbolic meaning of the shadows.  The story further continues into alterations and more alterations of reality until the objects are completely abstract.  It is at this that the individual is baffled.  S/he takes labors mentally over these new and completely foreign objects.  They leave the cave and are dizzy with confusion then return again to attempt to make sense of the objects once again.  Finally it hits him/her that these objects are solitary – they symbolize no referential object.  There is no name as to call each of these objects.  They are to be accepted purely for what they are and nothing more.

At this we have come to the radicalizing moment.  If the individual accepts this then they become radicalized.

Now the individual returns to the external world with his/her friends and colleagues.  S/he describes for them of this marvelous other world with new and different objects.  They begin to understand other objects and concepts of their former world as also possessing the ability to have alternative expressions.  First it starts simple.  "How is this plate both a function for eating and an abstract sculpture at the same time?  What are other ways we can make a plate that is radically different but still carry a function?"  Then it goes beyond simple everyday items.  "If I squint while looking at this tree it becomes a completely abstract shape and has beauty to it.  At what point is the tree no longer a tree?  Is it determined by how I look at it?"  Eventually over time they explore larger world concepts of sociological, political, cultural and philosophical navigations.  "What other ways can government exist that they might be abstracted, but still carry a purpose?"

Their friends and colleagues will think they are delusional or hallucinating, but individual assures them that what they have witnessed is true.  “So, what you have seen is real?” one might say. 

“Well, yes.  And no.” s/he would answer. 

“And these different and other worldly objects, they are real?”

“Both yes and somehow no.”

“Well, how can this one thing exist and not exist?  And this other world with other governments and other countries and other economies, how can they exist if your impetus carries such a flawed genesis?”

“It might be possible that if you also see this then you will understand this alternative world.”

So, the individual takes his/her colleague to the cave.  However, in this case the colleague does not accept what they see when an abstract appears in their field of view.

“Do you not see this strange object that represents only an abstract form?”

“All I see is a shadow and nothing more.”

“But the shadow has a representation of a large meaning beyond what you can see.”

“The shadow’s only meaning is that it is a shadow.  You’re ideas are flawed from the start.  I will bother no more with this.”

And so we are left to ourselves, but now the seed is born.  As we’ve accepted experimental cinema we must accept and even instigate experimental life-styles, experimental habits, experimental logic.  A notch has turned in our brain.  What was previously not possible has become possible.  What was previously out of our angle of view we now see because our view has become so wide that the horizon has disappeared.  Reality holds a myriad of possibilities.  Realization is brought upon because of the field we engulf ourselves in.