LA Book Fest

Made it back to the book festival on UCLA campus this year. A ton of great authors again. Very well organized affair. Karla and I stood in line for about 15 minutes to see Frank McCourt interview Mitch Albom (I thought it was going to be the other way around). Very entertaining, light-on-its-feet affair. Albom is unassuming and winsome, a great stoyteller in person, led an interesting life before becoming a writer, McCourt is Irish and witty. During the Q and A time, Albom mentioned something that struck me, about staying in Detroit now that he's a millionaire, famous author, etc. A member of the audience posed the question, "why does he stay there?" He mentioned giving back to the community that gave him his first break, loyalty, etc. He added in passing "New York has enough writers, and LA is too nice. The Midwest keeps me grounded." McCourt asked him why all his books tackle the bigger issue of death. Say what you want about Albom's simplicity, his aw-shucks sentimentality, etc, but he confronts the issue of death in his work. He admitted his second two "novels" were outgrowths of the first "Tuesdays with Morrie," and wrestle with death as a result of that first one. On the way home Karla and I passed through Beverly Hills and down into the Sunset Strip, inching along for a few miles - a truck had rammed into a traffic light next to the Rite Aid on the edge of the strip. In some sense, this is the heart of LA, or where the tourists think it is anyway. The Whisky - one thinks of Guns and Roses, The House of Blues - Ice Cube and Nas were on the Marquee, The Standard - one thinks of the blonde bombshell in underwear behind the glass at the famous nightclub - so postmodern???, The Chateau Marmont and Lindsay Lohan's latest foibles or whatever. This is all within a few blocks radius. And the patrons were out early, some bands from the Midwest walking around, taking it in, college kids excited about being the legal drinking age, aspiring actors from West Hollywood feeling like insiders for a little while. Overhead, the sun shines down, the billboards loom largest. Captain Jack Sparrow from the latest upcoming Summer Blockbuster, Hillary Duff wearing diamonds for whoever, two young boyish models with no shirt on, lying back one expressionless, the other smiling faintly, a very Brokeback moment. This was, of course, the Abercrombie billboard - no clothes of any kind on the ad, mind you. A sexy blonde model falls backwards in the Skyy Vodka billboard, all demanding attention, all sprawled out across the sky, larger than life. Captain Jack himself must have taken up eight stories easily, establishing their importance in this city, where entertainment is God. I thought about Albom's comments - LA is too nice, he wouldn't be grounded here. His work confronts death. The contrast is so stark. LA is about the moment, there is a frenetic energy to the place, a promise of success, and it feels within reach. People are here to get things done, here to be rich or famous or both, or to get rich or famous or both, or else to project an image of success. LA is obsessed with right now. There are great things about this city, to be sure, but it has no memory, except in the realm of entertainment, and there it is only kept alive to turn a few more tricks off of it. The year is not measured out in the usual seasons - Spring Summer Fall Winter; it's Award Season, followed by Festival Season (it's Coachella this weekend), followed by Summer Blockbuster season, followed by the Fall Oscar movie season followed by Christmas movie season, followed by...Awards season again. Along the way, we have a few drinks, make a few appointments, go to Blockbuster to catch up on all the movies we didn't get a chance to see for each season, feeling left out if we didn't, or maybe we just rent Entourage to laugh about it all. And we're all somehow complicit in the relentless pursuit of the trivial. The reality of death? Have fun with that back in Detroit or Wyoming or wherever you said you were from. I'm busy trying to move from the East Side to the West Side, and hopefully someday before I die, I'll have a Jaguar and an apartment in Santa Monica with my own parking garage and a doorman to say "good morning Mister Shaw, good evening Mister Shaw, how do you like your coffee, sir?" And some years, during the Fall Oscar contender season, I'll confront death vicariously a few times, and make sure to make out my check to the child I sponsor in Malawi or Myanmar or Maine or some other third world country. Somewhere between La Cienega and La Brea, Karla said, "let's get out of this town and all the damn billboards."
The city has its own Spirit, its own consciousness. On the West Side, people feel healthy, happy, beautiful, insiders, young, or at least powerful. If Peter Pan moved back from Never Never land, he'd settle on the West Side. Meanwhile, in areas like Echo Park, Silver Lake, Los Feliz, intelligent hipsters create underground art, congratulating each other that they're not as shallow as the West Siders, so sincere in flannel and horn rimmed glasses, worshipping Saint Elliott Smith and praying to Conor Oberst, rocking the Casbah in moments of weakness. Do-gooder college kids come in from Biola and Asuza Pacific to travel in packs and wear the same clothes and look very out of place and bewildered, even at Starbucks, with all the pretty hipsters in Chucks and angel headed scenesters in white knee high boots advertising sex and beat ragamuffin gentrified neighborhoods wanting for nothing. And the city breathes in and suppresses its shadow side, its awareness of death and decay and ugliness to South of the 10 freeway, with the trodden upon masses of minorities, and all the white trash finds its way to the Valley, just like Germany ships off all their old cars to Poland, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria. The West can tell you what's what with its billboards, its beauty, its sense of illusory history.

 

Proteus - And Late Night German TV

In Homer's epic poem The Odyssey, Proteus is a changeling, a god who is captured by the stranded King Menelaus, and changes into animals and trees to frighten his captor. Eventually, through holding on tight, Menelaus is able to find out how to get home. In our culture, we are stuck staring at Proteus, awed by the ever changing, the ever new. Branding, advertising demands this of us. It demands that we be focused on change, on freshness, on innovation. It demands new trends. It creates the illusion of a need where there is none. We live in what Gore Vidal calls the "United States of Amnesia." We are Lotus eaters with no sense of direction home. While in Germany over break I chanced upon an old film The Robe, a 50s epic about the Roman soldier who won Jesus' robe, an older movie in the tradition of Ben Hur, etc. Now the movie didn't just look old, it felt old. One of the reasons is apparent on the movie's imdb page - the average length of a shot in this film is 15 seconds. The average shot in contemporary film and television? 2-4 seconds. it's this reduction that indicates what has happened in ADHD land. We're obsessed with change, with a new image piled upon new image, with no time to contemplate what we're being presented with. The media is a fast-talking carpet bagger from the North. Taking a week to unplug, from internet, no cell phone service, taking an hour for breakfast under fir trees, birds chirping overhead. This is the contemporary equivalent of a vow of silence, taking time, slowing down, allowing an internal space to open up. This is the antithesis of life in Los Angeles, even for us non-scenester proles who work, go home, eat, grade papers, and go to sleep. It's this amnesia that conributes to much of the contemporary malaise. Without a sense of history, what we've been through as people, as families, as nations, that we lose a sense of gratitude, thankfulness for what we've achieved, how far we've come, what opportunities are there. This is replaced by a sense of entitlement, but ultimately a sense of fragmentation and boredom. Traditionally, people have come West to escape, whether persecution, or lack of opportunity, or the confines and social strictures of Old Europe. There is no place much further West than Los Angeles, a protean, shifting city with no memory. It creates, packages, and sells the ever new. If it's not awards season, it's Summer blockbuster season in which we tally the numbers and note that they are down 3% from last year, and we write articles and listen to industry insiders and pundits debate why not enough people went to see Spider Man 3. Then we finally find out who is the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby. We are obsessed with the trivial. How could we possibly miss a new episode of Desperate Housewives? That's how we get through the week. We justify it because our overworked bodies and brains need a rest, and our disconnected loneliness needs some facsimile of community, which we find vicariously onscreen. Late night, state-funded television in Germany (long after Germany's Next Top Model) took a close look at Mexican child laborers trying to come across the American border and turning to homosexual prostitution in Tijuana to stay alive. Some of them make it across for brief periods only to be deported and turn back to their street urchin lives in Mexico. It showed the in-depth lives of child prostitutes in Manila, and followed up on their lives now, some wasting away from drug use, some trying to find their way out, some dying from STDs, but none with any real hope. One lingering shot showed two 17 year olds who sleep in a wooden cart on the street holding each other, both of their minds severely damaged from daily huffing to numb their existence. They have been told they both have syphilis and to come back the next day to the Unicef shelter for some kind of aid, but in the morning, they've forgotten already, living as they do, literally one day at a time. The third and perhaps most heartbreaking of the late-night documentaries was from Northern Uganda, where villages are attacked by rebels, some are slaughtered, others are captured, some children, some adults, and forced to invade, rape and murder other villages by the rebels. The documentary showed mothers who had heard their children had been killed. It showed young mothers who had been kidnapped as concubines, gotten pregnant and tossed aside, now also not accepted by their old villages, thought to be rebel whores. It showed their tears and their desperation. It showed a church celebration, welcoming one of the kidnapped men, who by now had committed rape and murder, back into the village, in gesterues of grace and forgiveness and contrition. It showed Westerners, a lone English doctor with far too many patients. A Corsican who built a prosthetic workshop, where those missing limbs could build prosthetics for themselves and others who fall prey to mines. It showed the village coming together to dance and sweat in honor of the coming politician who makes a speech but has done nothing to help stop the violence. In America one feels the constancy of what TS Eliot called being "distracted from distraction by distraction." One hears vague things about Darfur, "problems in Africa," one hears about Beaners hopping the border. One hears about the fat Westerners on sex tourist trips to Asia, but one sees no detail, no image, creates no concept of the severity and depth of the problem. Why? Why so insulated and blind? I'm here a week and the fog of forgetting and current preoccupations have clouded my mind already. Maybe escape is the only way to clear-headedness. Maybe leaving the country is the only way to get past Proteus.

Spring Break

I got back from Frankfurt last weekend. Spent a week breathing some frsh air for a change, unwinding with my brother, playing with Calvin, his 10 month old, eating long breakfasts on his back porch. It was the first time I'd been back in Spring since graduating from FIS in 97. A very different vibe than Christmas or Summer, triggering different memories, different selves. We went for a trip to beautiful Ruedesheim on the Rhein, wandered up to the majestic Niederwald Monument depicting a mythical female figure representing Germany - I feel a poem coming on, maybe I'll post it later.
http://www.ruedesheim.de/en/sehenswert_niederwalddenkmal.html
I noticed something upon my return. Something about my students. During the year, a common complaint around the staff room is the kids' boredom level. Everything is boring, everything sucks. No matter what you plan with how many bells and whistles, no matter what movie you choose, or how much they actually respond to it (my 9th graders enjoyed Dead Poets Sociewty wayy more than I would have thought) it's almost a reflex to complain about how bored they are. Now, a part of me, and I'm sure other teachers, feel slightly defeated by this, as if the confluence of forces provided in insurmountable obstacle, brain-dead, ego driven music, advertising that fosters egocentrism, a cultural fascination with youth, little support for learning, curiosity, expanding the mind. Little reverence for something outside of ourselves. Research supports the current graduates are the most narcissistic ever. One can feel overwhelmed. Kids are always complaning about how bored they are in class. The funny thing is, at least 50 per cent of the journals I collected the first day back from break confessed the kids were bored with Spring Break and wanted to come back to school because they missed their friends. This led me to consider the extent to which it's my job, especially as the English teacher, where kids can encounter story, other cultures, other ways of being, to facilitate that place of wonder of mystery, of something outside ourselves - to foster the imagination and creativity as a means of counteracting the toxic elements of our culture that stifle and choke creativity. Having a double major in English and Psychology, I experienced this split first hand. The Psychology major, while providing some benefits, largely participated in and propogated a modernist epistemology based on the scientific method, a means of systematizing, rationalistic and propositional understanding. The English major, on the other hand, provided a commentary on the ills of culture and a means of counteracting them, an antidote. I an starting to believe that the greatest task we can have is teachers is to help instill, to the extent we can, a sense of beauty, mystery, and wonder about the world, to help activate the imagination, to facilitate spaces of creativity and discovery. Now, this is much easier said than done with a group of 100 9th graders addicted to ipods, PSPs, who live in the smog-filled, concrete jungle that is is LA. One ingredient helpful in this process is nature. As children we have a kind of mystical bond with nature, it inhabits us, it creates a sense of mystery. Another part of me wonders if most High School kids are in a certain stage of disillusion, of de-enchantment, and that this re-enchantment can only take place in college, which many of my students won't attend.
Still turning this over in my mind, I came across a great article on it
http://www.crosscurrents.org/Raboteau.htm
more later, my 9th graders are restless...