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Glendale art party
Saturday, June 9 2001
Tonight I drove the Punch Buggy Rust into downtown Los Angeles to visit the various people at Bathtubgirl Central. Since Bathtubgirl herself had flown to Detroit to attend her grandfather's funeral, this meant I was going there mostly to visit Linda, Julian and Snow. My goal really wasn't so much to visit as it was to rendezvous. We were planning on going from there to a sort of "art party" in Glendale (up in the Valley near Pasadena).
When I got off the freeway and began tooling through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, I was confused by the restrictions imposed by the one-wayness of many of the streets and found myself driving down Los Angeles street, which is one street east of Bathtubgirl's Main street. And now, after having done so, I know why Los Angeles is called "the home of the homeless."
The dusty, hulking commercial buildings largely appeared to be vacant, the streets full of trash, and along the wide sidewalks the homeless had built villages of cardboard. Most of their structures were small, not much larger coffins, and not very different in appearance. But people actually do live in those things. And though in the warm, semi-arid climate of Los Angeles cardboard is a perfectly adequate building material, others among the homeless had tents. When you're not paying rent sometimes it's possible to spring for the really nice portable digs. Ironically, though this place is surely one of the seediest, most blighted areas in all of Los Angeles, I got the feeling that it's probably a fairly safe place to be. After all, here you have dozens and dozens of people living outside twenty four hours a day, witting or unwitting witnesses to anything bad that might befall anyone. They themselves must have a keen interest in looking out for one another since none of them have any locks or, for that matter, doors. In such a situation, real community can develop in a way that's impossible among the controlled-access condos and subterranean parking structures of West LA, a place where people don't even go out on their porches. And indeed, there did seem to be community in the cardboard city. People were sitting outside of their little homes on alley-picked furniture, some of them drinking, some of them smoking, most of them with smiles on their faces.
The presence of this cardboard city got me to thinking, what are the circumstances that can lead to a part of town being colonized by the cardboard-dwelling demographic? I'm sure that the police try to shoo away the first few people who set up cardboard homes in an area, but after awhile the sheer number of people arriving and building homes is overwhelming and the authorities are forced to retreat. Soon the alleys smell like feces and the streets fill with detritus. It has become home to the homeless.
In Bathtubgirl Central, Linda was doing a webcast while Julian and Snow were hanging out with some unknown guy who mostly sat on a couch quietly reading. I drank a beer and gave a little show and tell demonstration of various instances of Vodkatea rating widgets.
I went into the bathroom/studio to piss at one point, and the place was all lit up with black lights and looked like some sort of psychedelic Wunderraum. I pissed in the toilet and the urine glowed dull green in the bowl. As I flushed it down, the green faded slowly to grey; water evidently doesn't fluoresce anywhere near as much as urine does.
We all carpooled in Linda's cherry-red Honda to Glendale. The party, an event called "Cannibal Flower," took some driving around to find, but eventually we were there. People were milling around out front, some in rave-style costume, though most looked as if they were dressed to get laid. The price of admission was $7, or $5 if one came in costume. But, as I told Linda and Julian, it was worth $2 not to put on some goofy humiliating outfit.
The space was a sort of raw warehouse with smaller little domestic-style kitchen and closet type rooms on one side. Finding a bathroom was difficult, and the one I found didn't even have a sink. Thank the Good Lord, though, it did have lemon air freshener.
LA parties will never stop being LA parties and that's what I hate about them. People at an LA party, even those with whom you never exchange a word, seem to be trying really hard to come off as more important and significant than they actually are. You can see it in their body language, the way people walk through crowds, the way they stand in doorways blocking the passage of others by pretending the others cannot be seen. For some reason tonight I felt very off my game, sort of unsociable and somewhat unworthy of the scene. I stood there in front of the hip-hop/groovin' funk band, watching this woman dancing and occasionally even making eyes at me. But then this guy in maroon leather pants came from out of nowhere (with his beautiful girlfriend, mind you) and started dancing with her. They danced for maybe five minutes and then the guy and his girlfriend left as suddenly as they'd came. He doubled back at the last moment and grabbed the girl he'd been dancing with by hand to lead her away. If two is same old-same old, perhaps three is a party. Once they were gone I found myself surrounded by an uncomfortably vast empty pocket of floor.
At some point Linda invited me outside to partake in some hashish provided by a girlfriend of hers. We smoked it out in the parking lot between an SUV and a brick wall with crumbling prolapses of mortar.
Nominally, the party was about art, and there was art there: paintings, mosaics, people doing random little performance pieces, and one little setup where people could have a speaker-equipped globe placed over their heads for an immersive sound experience.
Most of the people at the party were young, of breeding age, and (as I mentioned) dressed to be bred. But there was also this one old codger there, and he must have been well into his 70s. He was apparently there on his own but he appeared to be enjoying the scene all the same. In contrast to his almost unavoidably conservative clothing style, he'd evidently kept up with some aspects of modern dance culture. For instance, he wore a blinking tribal-electronic medallion around his neck. I wondered what it would be like to be this age and be interested enough to immerse myself into something as contemporary as, say, raver culture. It must have been exhausting to have somehow stayed current with the youths of the many generations with whom he has been a contemporary. Think of all the cultural waves that have passed through his life! By contrast, my father (for example) has never been interested in popular culture, not even the popular culture of his own youth. As a kid growing up I heard him sneer at nearly all trends in 20th century pop culture, from George Gershwin to jazz to rock and roll to abstract expressionist art. Most of what he had to say about these things made sense to an extent, but when you're a teenager and it's 1981, it's awfully hard not to love rock and roll, I don't care who your daddy is.
Somewhere near the end of the party I bought Budweisers for Snow, Julian, Linda and myself. I guess Julian was on the wagon because he gave Linda a plaintive look when I handed him his beer and she simply shrugged okay.
Linda drove Snow and me back downtown, and I went up to Bathtubgirl Central long enough to piss and then I drove myself home. I was still somewhat stoned and a little drunk, but I could drive okay. It was late and the freeways were nice and empty. The Punch Buggy Rust doesn't really run very good until it gets warm. I notice its engine runs considerably cooler than the one in my old Punch Buggy Green. I could actually place my had on parts of the engine block after driving home from downtown.
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