Profane Illumination...
A Venice flush with freedom-seeking extenders who share good words and perform good deeds is a marvelous sight to imagine, and not only because it would bring traffic to a standstill and perhaps force citizens to find a more ecologically-friendly means to transport themselves, even get a bicycle like Gerry and join Critical Mass, or start footing it. What will make this fantasy real?
Since society is not likely to change from the top-down anytime soon in a way that satisfies most alternative residents, we could certainly use a few of these seekers to at least filter around town and make something happen. They could make the society we live and interact in on an everyday basis freer and more democratic, and this could lead to the insight for creating the attitudes and habits to make a more equal and humane society.
The Surrealists, whose movement surfaced in the early 1920s in a time of social disruption and economic crisis, faced a similar dilemma. These artists and writers felt their society, and especially the notion of material progress that drove it, stifled human potential. It was extremely rational and controlling, to the point in fact of becoming thoroughly irrational and chaotic, a surreal distortion where absurd behaviors were inevitable. It was like the waste from society’s failings couldn’t be completely cleaned up; its swarms of counterfactual bugs couldn’t be fully exterminated.
Less concerned with why, they immersed themselves in this surreal overflow and played around. They pushed thresholds, trying to dissolve the barriers between waking and sleeping. They explored feelings and states of mind removed from what most considered reality with exquisite images and words and their well-crafted combinations. Since a normal lens is no more than a convention anyway, an illusion, they played with every possible angle on reality through abnormal, even paranormal ones. While this could be intoxicating, they believed it would lead to useful perspectives. In the tremens of freaking-out delirious in a society that intoxicated, they could soberly pursue the truth.
In the late 1920s they entered a new phase. They began to feel that created objects were not the only vehicles to change a society with little prospect of changing. They tried to break free from written and visual language and focus on experiencing the everyday world purely and automatically, living poetically and artistically free from the aesthetic wraps of poetry and art, which they felt could help craft a more creative existence. While it’s debatable if this separation is ever possible, they were eager apprentices who shifted much of their attention away from galleries and manuscripts, taking their craft to the streets as performers to grasp the warping society with whatever materials they could muster.
Experiencing the everyday in this way involved developing a creative relation to physical objects. In a twist on the anthropologists’ craft, they excavated treasured sentiments and ideas from their reflections on these objects. Guillaume Apollinaire, a significant muse for the Surrealists, called these poets tricksters. They could conjure meaning from objects that seemed ready for the trash heap, were outmoded and on the verge of extinction, or those that were the first of their kind like an original tintype. There were energies in them, and in their contrasts. For Walter Benjamin, the traces of times past resonated with current relevance for the careful conjurer; anachronisms came alive. They were capable of bringing the “immense forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in…things to the point of explosion.”
Allen Ginsberg and the Beats were kindred spirits. They found enlightenment in the most prosaic places and through the most ordinary arrangement of objects in them. Ginsberg, with a boost from Zen, discovered revelations in the baggage room at the bus station, through the juxtaposition of fruits and vegetables in the supermarket, and on the docks of railroad yards.
Andre Breton’s Nadja is an apt manifesto. Published in 1928, the book exposes the city of Paris’s surrealized face through the author’s affair with Nadja, whom he meets through a chance encounter in the streets. It’s no high romance that unfolds, however, but a rather off-beat relationship. She’s not so much a sensual love object as a conduit to objects. At times he seems closer to the things that she’s close to than to her, and is more fascinated with her vision of the world and details of her life. It’s like she’s only a vision herself, a state of mind, and not a real person. After she goes mad and exits the story he becomes obsessed with her, and develops a renewed interest in her existence and the city.
The notion of profane illumination captures the Surrealists’ evolving creative attitude to objects. This is Walter Benjamin’s phrase to describe what he felt was the gist of their innovative method of response to society. Their interest in enlightened discovery and a critical perspective on society’s failings, its dark counterfactuals, came together in this fascinating idea. It refers to an inspiration spawned by openness to a kind of experience that escapes the rational world, especially its performance-driven traps and dependencies. Ambling through city streets, or just hanging out with friends, they discovered spaces, sensations, moments, uncanny and irrational objects that disoriented and estranged. These experiences were also a catalyst for spurring the awareness to expose the parties and institutions responsible for performing society’s bad deeds.
This openness to experience could be drug-induced. Experiments with mind-expanding drugs were common during these years, and Benjamin himself had been recording his observations of city life using mescaline for several years. But drugs could only provide a preliminary boost. The inspiration was ultimately produced by the surplus of surreal distractions and distortions, a worldly conditioning that trumped personal whim.
Society’s imperfections left an illuminated trail of profane products for those with discriminating eyes. These profanities were embarrassing exceptions to the story of progress. They were produced by a society of rationalized hierarchies and exclusions addicted to performance goals and profit margins. The effects were evident in a toxic planet, polluted lifestyles, personalities made not to fit, as well as the homeless and the many wasted lives that had to be pushed aside. This included the Surrealists and other critically-minded citizens who were sure to find more exceptions to the story. The very existence of the profane was synonymous with outsiders. An us-versus-them mentality ruled where certain people and values were deemed more important; sacred, in fact. But however sacred many believed society was, it was actually quite unholy and heathenish. There was ample evidence in the behaviors of those who exploited others that morality was surely lacking, and God was likely dead.
So the Surrealists identified with society’s marginal and underground members, and especially the beaten spaces they populated, believing the secret to the mystery of how society worked, or didn’t, could be found there, and certainly not in the above-and-beyond. They were hardly bleary-eyed mystics contemplating their navels or metaphysical abstractions. In fact, they were especially obsessed with freeing themselves from the effects of religious illumination. They believed you shouldn’t get too worked up and try to fathom obscure mysteries since you might miss what’s truly important. The enigmas that matter in an overly-rational world arrive in fits and starts, and you access them by chilling out and plugging into the here-and-now. Facing off with the unknown could certainly be positive; experience could suddenly explode with marvelous twists and turns. But it was important to avoid the urge to look up into the heavens for answers and learn to depend on sacred relief. //
Since it wasn’t easy to recognize and connect the dots anyway, you had to believe the world you faced was not what it seemed and try to conjure the one that really matters. The true believers drew from their own experience and actively pushed to flush out the real world’s profanities, make as much of society look like it really is as they could. This required some ingenuity because however self-illuminating the already-surrealized society was, they couldn’t merely lie in wait for the results. Meaningful inspiration was produced through a sort of shared venture. It was latent in society and in the beholders’ eyes and mind.
For example, they drew attention to themselves as the barbarians society said they were, and shoved their unsavory presence in the faces of the more sacred than thou who pushed the system on. If everything had to look so good, why not smirch the sacred gloss at every turn? Take every opportunity to burst their sectarian bubbles. Shock and disarm them. Profane the residues of sacredness that keep profanities in place.
An orgy inside the LA Cathedral might lead to a riot and possible jail time for its participants, but it could also draw attention to the role of the Catholic Church in sexual abuse. If all the homeless in Venice filed into Bank of America simultaneously to open accounts, the media might show up and help raise awareness about glitches in the economic recovery, though the real frenzy might come when the cops arrive with the vans and haul them off to County, further testing the overcrowded prisons (this could perhaps be an effective backdoor solution to homelessness, however!). If money is so sacred, try to burn it in a public ceremony outside the Stock Exchange to kickstart a discussion about supply side economics, or the Fed’s latest Quantitative Easing policies.
Street Surrealism
Near California Ave and Abbot Kinney Blvd there are several streets and alleys named after Surrealists or the regions they hailed from, like Andalusia, Aragon, Cadiz and Cabrillo. These are perfect plants in a city where many have dreamt of different realities in various states of awakening. Rumors about Breton, Dali, Aragon, Desnos and others passing through Venice for a little resort time enroute to that famous meeting with Trotsky in Mexico still circulate, however, fueled perhaps by rogue elements in the local art scene that believed Surrealists should have taken the next step and become more political. Kristen, who sells incense near Breeze Ave and the boardwalk on weekends, swears her grandfather saw baby-faced Andre twirling his umbrella one sunny day outside the Rosemary Theater.
Unfortunately these streets and alleys are now surrounded by valeted nightspots and boutiques. Aragon Ct, a short narrow alley abutting Abbot Kinney Blvd from the west, has been erased from the tour maps, but hopefully the remainder won’t suffer the same fate or be renamed no matter how commercialized the area becomes. Venice has a long history of attracting a diversity of creative migrants, and has given sanctuary to many exiled artists and intellectuals as well.
The surrealist mindset thrives in places like beaten Venice with a surplus of streetwise folks and potential profaners who live in the moment, as well as a nearly perfect storm of influences: shocking carnival of contrasts, edgy behaviors, pockets of dream life, as well as drenches of amusement and nature. These have pushed many to richly experience everyday life in the city’s ordinary spaces and spectacular scenes, readymade stimuli to evade the predictable and undermine the performance principle. Though perhaps a bit shy on credentials, they’re addicted to good habits and know their substances. They can slip into rapture at the sight of a reptile-fondling tightrope artist wobbling above clanging Hare Krishnas snaking their way through a mass of pie-eyed tourists; a pigeon formation shadowing a scatter of surfers; or a tattered lotto ticket dancing on the wind.
They’re like alchemists. Alchemists are utopian-minded craftspeople, populist scientists without an official shingle who convert low-level metals and substances, controlled and uncontrolled, into higher ones, especially gold. They’re also known for cooking potions and elixirs to help extend life, useful credentials for residents of a place like Venice with a high concentration of youth-minded folks.
But these profaners hardly need to dust off those chemistry sets hidden away in the attic. They use their inspiration to convert the base elements of street life into precious mental states and forms of beauty and truth. They bear witness to flawed relationships, distorted views, the community’s wasted human debris, and make sense of it all by acting out scenarios that can salvage their potential. They tell the stories that make the connections few others recognize. They insert themselves into conversations and situations and create golden oral moments, perhaps even some useful gilded legends. They fuse the waste and imperfections into forms of spiritual fertilizer that spread around town and work overtime to make as many as possible see the light.
This take on the world is not what we expect from most artists and intellectuals who tend to act like flighty tourists when it comes to all kinds of waste. Perhaps that’s why Thomas Mann, Theodore Adorno, Arnold Schoenberg and Bertolt Brecht, famous exiles from Europe before WWII, found the gentrified stretch up the coast a bit more to their liking, viewing the Venice pop scene as another franchise of the wasteland.
Aldous Huxley is an exception. He was a passionate if irregular presence in the city’s streets, making many sojourns here over the years. There are stories aplenty of him scoring substances around town. He was an honorary citizen whose famous book, The Doors of Perception, published in 1954, provided the name for the city’s most famous rock band.
But this book also offered insights into the drug experience. It was perhaps the perfect preparation for a precocious profaner concerned, as his focus on Hyperion revealed, with exactly how our rationalized society manufactures wasted people and tracks them through a process that creates the illusion of free choice. And it’s also an excellent primer for anyone interested in expanding consciousness. He taught us how to open the doors of perception with a chemical boost to manage an escape from repressive social systems that drug their subjects into zombies.
Our famous alchemist’s muse was William Blake. “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.” This reference from Blake’s 1793 book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, crystallizes Huxley’s debt. In fact he wrote an essay in 1956 titled Heaven and Hell that has since been included in the 1954 book.
Like Benjamin, Huxley experimented with mescaline to discover the experience that escapes the rational world and its enslavement of beings to material objects and profit, themes and concerns central to Blake’s book written in the revolutionary heat of post-1789 France. The book records Huxley’s impressions over the course of several hours in 1953 under the drug’s influence. He claims to have directly experienced a cleansing, to have opened the doors of perception and cut through the clutter of designs, actively transcended the cavern’s chinks that distort what matters and what truly is. Though not against contemplative transcendence, he believed the complete experience enhanced through mescaline pushed the person toward a greater alertness and more correct social behavior.
These results suggest that Huxley is at least kin to Benjamin’s profane illuminator. The experiments with mescaline are a conspicuous overlap. They both believed that this non-addictive drug was only a preliminary boost for learning how to open the doors. The purpose was to cultivate the mindset for seeing the world differently that would become habit. You could argue that for Benjamin the illuminating power was meant to be practiced in the streets where the revolutionary experience cooked which could free the seeker from the performance principle. His is an active profaner, an engaged flaneur who ambles around open to tears in the social fabric and ready to make things happen. His larger vision was that the masses, who he believed had the potential to see things as they are like their masters, could actively shape the future direction of society. Not exactly Huxley’s cup of tea.
There’s a certain affinity here between Benjamin’s active flaneur and Venice’s mass of street surrealists beside themselves with inspiration, the everyday bohemians who trip through the back-doors and side-doors of perception. This culturally-inspired beaten wasteland was surely prepped by the time of Huxley’s demise in the early 1960s to welcome a diversity of experimenters with all sorts of substances. It was an open field laboratory for curious chemists, edgy alchemists, testosteroned spirits and just good folks wanting to bypass the bummers of everyday life with a perceptual charge. Who needs an afternoon of contemplative research when your neighbors can take notes and record your movements and flows 24/7, and give you instant feedback on how to hitch a ride on the nearly perfect storm?
Swinging Doors
If the Doors hadn’t been born in the immediate aftermath of Huxley’s death, the mid-1960s, they would have had to be invented. Jim Morrison was different in sensibility from both Huxley and Benjamin. He was neither the learned Brit somewhat aloof from the masses, nor the erudite German claiming them for the coming revolution. But he fused their perceptual and profaning powers to address the new consumers of pop culture with many issues of the day as their free-verse poet intellectual, boosted from a new palette of intoxicants taken under decontrolled conditions. As a visionary young poet he sought, like the Surrealists, to illuminate objects as they exist in time “through a clean eye.” As a musician he performed prayers and poems to purge perception and engage all the senses in some collective transparent happening, aka the rock concert spectacle, to urge his faithful to break on through to the other side. It was like he wanted everyone to become alchemists and learn how to convert their senses into the advanced powers that would make this break. In fact he muses about alchemy in his early prose jottings, believing this “erotic science” could sense correspondences in and between unlikely orders of being and transform the results into something greater.
He was a master profaner, illuminating problems in the media, politics, religion and consumerism, shocking masses of faithful and introducing them to different orders of reality, even another America.
But he was also crassly profane on stage and elsewhere, at least later on, perhaps pushed to gorge his sybaritic fancies by the fans that idolized him. He came to be illuminated more than the issues. The mental and physical waste and chemicals that any good alchemist will strive to transform into something superior merely piled up. His consciousness and being bloated, in need of purification, and his perception plugged up. He was shrink-wrapped by fame and spectacle, not unlike how his 20th century foxes were wrapped up in plastic boxes. It’s revealing that he died of a heroin overdose, consuming a drug known for closing the doors of perception. Morrison went to the other side fighting demons while Huxley passed peacefully through the portals on LSD, fortunate to sense his fate a few hours in advance, perhaps rewarded for his years of healthy consciousness expansion.
Morrison’s nihilism may have kept him from anointment as a credible Dionysius, but his larger-than-life presence has been a catalyst pushing regular residents with little interest in drug research beyond themselves. After all, Venice’s nature and amusement drenches have been stirring the perception pot for many years. Many swill the relevant clichés and see what happens, submit to the city’s nearly perfect storm of influences and even hitch a ride to somewhere. Keeping a reasonably hip attitude toward things and people has been the best insurance to prevent the doors from disappearing. They may find nirvana or the godhead, but possibly also a closed-door drug therapy program since there are no guarantees in life, whatever the substances folks rely on for salvation, or to salvage their moments.
It wasn’t without risks for the chemically imbalanced. Liberties taken to leap across wide expanses of unknown territory, or ingest dense chunks of unrelated substance, might twist any bit of sense on the tips of tongues into very bad downers and trips.
Like the day when Rufus, bummed out because his girlfriend’s cat hadn’t come back for what seemed like years, stared into the firmament flat on his back on a roof near Pacific and Sunset, and saw himself dangling from a tree in front of her window across from Venice High. He apologized and apologized until realizing later that she dumped him back in 1967 and her only association with animal life was to a little yellow canary that drowned itself one day in a bad batch of Kool Aid. But he beat Jim Morrison’s Big Blue Bus across town by 20 minutes without leaving his deck.
Too much bending of time and space, as Rufus will be the first to admit, may weaken your brain cells so substantially that your thoughts take off like Frisbees on steroids. But if you can stay fairly balanced and at least train your sights and mind on bending and stretching, loosen up and make a few links without having to worry about flunking a drug test, our natural and surreal furies might get you imagining how to breed a rooster with a fish.
The signs are there for anyone to play with, in the most deprived or most opulent living spaces, the glitz of gentrified facades, or the piles of Monday morning beach detritus. The results might not be poetry, but the materials can stimulate the desire to act out poetic states. Venice’s street surrealists, whatever their degree of readiness, catch similar waves of insight as their famed forebears who reached the point where words were losing their sock and the auras that once stitched the world’s mysteries together were losing their power. But armed with this insight, poets and the poetical can putz around in the withdrawal spaces where these meanings once held true and create alternatives, even leave us in stitches awhile.
Imagine Louis Aragon ambling around town in his prime of perceptive power. He might mingle with the swarm of ambiance chasers along the boardwalk, slip into the muscle quarter and drool over the ageless sculptures, spy our newest citizens gorging on happy hour in the Canal Club, or even drop into the Town House, a marvelous gargoyled original on Windward, and chat with George about its former life as the famed Minelli’s restaurant, its logo still in the entryway.
He could teleport himself into the homeless mindscapes panhandling in the alley behind Elly Nesis, walk in and get the latest condo prices for Oakwood, lurch toward his dream space while rapping with Ralphy---whom he mistakes for his mate Salvador in his prime---on California near the Electric Lodge. Finding this property a little pricey he might get distracted and stalk a few of Nadja’s bikini-clad, implanted upgrades to the water for some chitchat.
On any given day many of his extended kin go about their everyday routines and do similar things, but they mostly go unnoticed. They wander over to Aragon Ct, or virtually any other spaces around town where the inspiration lies, and hang out for a while. This is a very short and narrow alley abutting Abbot Kinney Blvd from the west. At sidewalk’s edge we get a good glimpse of this popular strolling space, the many boutiques, furniture stores, design galleries, and swank eateries that bring hordes of visitors to these shores but also cater to recent arrivals living in the vicinity. Named after the city’s founder, this artery flows with what some architects of the new Venice feel is Abbot’s true spirit.
Sowing the Spirit
Standing under the sign that bears this alley’s name you can flash on the seam of shiny surfaces stretching in both directions, an especially striking sight with the recent changes and additions to the Blvd. Admittedly these facades hardly get you to reminisce about the real past. The stores are adorned with names that must’ve been logoed in the heads of creative consultants choosing from standard options in a dialogue box to satisfy Milan, Paris or wherever. Like Alternative, a trendy short-lived boutique with quite predictable fare which gave way recently to a real estate company.
But the past is present in your widest angle of vision. A real estate company and an art gallery both garnish their interests with Abbot’s name. Then there’s Abbot’s Habit down to the right a few blocks, a vibrant café founded in 1993 where strands of the real alternative Venice cohabit with avant admen, design divas and the newest influx of trustfunders. It breathes life into the founder’s cultural vision with quality readings and other events.
There’s an especially revealing leftover at the intersection of Aragon and Abbot Kinney: the Glencrest Bar B Cue Restaurant. The name sticks out from the string of slick logos. What kind of eatery these days tells you what it is? The lettering and décor say enter if you’re famished, not famous or schmoozing fame. So there’s no need for a valet, and most of the customers are locals and on foot anyway.
Once inside it’s easy to imagine you’re somewhere else, perhaps in one of those popular joints off Arbor Vitae and La Brea in Inglewood, or in South Central. Or that you’re in a time warp and living back when the Blvd was an edgy and more demographically diverse slum. The place is sort of a throwback to when Oakwood, historically the African-American section, spilled into this area of town. The ribs themselves seem appropriately stuck in the free-form phase of Grandma’s kitchen, resilient to authentication via Chicago or Memphis. Even the daily menu is chalked up above the take-out counter.
And it’s the only one! No one has yet bought it out and minted it to malls all over the land. Its days are likely numbered, but its survival will continue to draw folks to the Blvd in search of pockets that escape gentrification.
There’s a painting on the side of the building that could have been a Dali discard from his days of berating the bourgeoisie, perhaps in the late 1920s when he collaborated with Luis Bunuel. It’s a head on a male torso attired in black suit, tie, and white shirt that appears to be morphing between animal and human. Is it beginning as pig, or in the process of becoming one? The head is a cartoonish, three-dimensional sculpture, but the torso is two-dimensional. The head has a reasonable facsimile of a pig’s nose and ears, but narrow eyes that are all-too-human. The mouth is quite wide, more like an animal’s, but it is open a slit as if saying something. There is virtually no neck, only folds of flesh layered on the torso. This enlarged head has a bullet shape in the back.
The torso has no arms or shoulders. The bottom of the image cuts across the chest, and the cut is not linear but wavy, as if ripped from a larger image. The sides however are linear and symmetrical. The whole picture is unbalanced. The right side dips farther down than the left, as if pasted haphazardly onto the wall. It could be seen as an image that was hastily spray painted by someone passing in the night. Perhaps it was one of Robbie Conal’s apprentices interested in upgrading graffiti to art.
The head is unquestionably bloated and overfed, inviting a host of negatives associated with this animal. The piggish bourgeoisie aptly suggests itself, as does a jab at what happens to those who consume its flesh. They become a demented carnivore, doomed to some animal/human existence. Perhaps a roving band of vegans, funded by developers who want that space for a valet restaurant to snatch a higher class of consumers, made their point.
Looking at the head and torso together, however, opens up possibilities. It can suggest a confident snoot against white collar life, and for the class of pork eaters that lacks representation on the Blvd these days. Or possibly it humanizes the pig, offering a little image repair for this alleged slovenly species that has suffered a fate similar to pigeons, the beings they follow in the word book. It could be an excellent advertisement. Consume the fatty flesh feeling smarter about yourself. Gorge guiltlessly on a substance that, like the egg, might be good for you after all despite the cholesterol. Suits sucked into trendy diets, come on in!
However, there are very few suits, if any, present on a given day, and the atmosphere seems averse to the kind of spending that goes with them. So there’s no worry of being embarrassed if you’re shy on plastic since it’s mostly cash and carry out dining. Though there are a few plasticized-rubber lawn chairs and tables outside to hold parties of rib lovers, one at the moment with a stack of fliers about beginning Lindy Hop classes. If it catches on this original improvisational street dance might spread and reignite local civil rights activists, even help recruit troops to take back the Blvd.
The Surrealists were known for creating collages with animals and humans, so it’s no surprise that someone spray painted this image on that wall. Breton put a cartooned shark’s head on the body of a violent royal in The Comte de Foix Going to Assassinate His Son. And there’s a Magritte painting titled Presence of Mind that should be xeroxed and circulated in all the coffee houses here. A man stands facing us on what looks like a foggy Venice beach, dressed to kill with bowler hat, topcoat, and suit and tie. To his left there’s a fish, to his right a bird, both the same height but slightly shorter than him. Each is the same distance from him and has roughly the same tall and angular shape. The fish is pointed upright. The bird sits on a perch buried in the ground.
Any Surrealist worth their salt, of the streets or not, raises doubts about the state of society and man’s fate within it. Are we really civilized? Are we progressing as a species? Perhaps this image on the wall is meant to remind citizens to stay in touch with their origins so they won’t begin to feel like they’ve broken the chain of evolution and become self-perfecting organisms living in some untouchable ozone. It certainly encourages us to reflect on the animal tendencies in the human jungle, and illuminate the real barbarians.
Purging the Past
From this alley we see another building across the Blvd on the left that violates this seam of shiny surfaces in a way similar to the Glencrest. It has a bland, off-white façade with no logo or sign to indicate what might be inside. This is not exactly a spiffy visual for this stretch of real estate. Who would not want to advertise their existence on this extroverted Blvd! Is it an underground studio devoted to the latest refinements in the adult arts not yet ready to surface? A stubborn and disgruntled holdover from the past that refuses to sell? It does look a lot like a run-down artist’s studio from 1970s Venice, a bargain space that perhaps gave a struggling sculptor enough capital time to seed a career. The mystery is only heightened by the institutional lettering on the front door: Dr. Janov Primal Center.
Janov! Yes, that sensational book published back in 1970, The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov, a must reading for any course on the alternatives to psychoanalysis. And it turns out this is one of his clinics devoted to primal therapy, his famous addition to the family of experimental therapies indebted to Wilhelm Reich, among others. It’s about going to the source of neurotic behavior where the feeling memories are, somewhere in the central nervous system, not just talking things out like with conventional cures. The latter is concerned with conceptual memories filtered through the rational head. The repressed primal pain of childhood must be faced and re-experienced, shouted out, before the patient can advance along a healthy path.
Many view his book as a surrogate bible for the let-it-all-hang-out boomers who gave themselves up to a future-shock pace through the 1960s. In galloping through and beyond the guilts to glimpse the promised land, they became aware of how far they’d traveled from their formative lives. It was common then to get so buzzed up about your distance from the aborigines, feel so civilized and modern and on top of the world and at the edge of history, that you lost touch with your tribal self. But the moment of truth came when you had to touch base with it. You realized the early trauma couldn’t be erased with all that fun in the sun, and you had to act out the meaning of what it meant to be still haunted by painful memories. This was of course the generation obsessed with perpetual youth, so at a certain point in the early 1970s it made sense that it was much more appealing to go back than forward into the 9-5 “adult” world. That was when this cure peaked in popularity, attracting some famous celebs in the bargain.
The clinic has delivered many satisfied Venetians since then who’ve learned to get in touch with their feelings, even tap into humanity’s grief for a while. Some have found the self they never imagined they had. The therapy offers an invaluable service for anyone needing to absorb the shocks from living in the warp of different times, places, and spaces simultaneously. But the times have changed. Anyone can freely scream their dramas down the boardwalk on any given Sunday, flip off their trauma and the past that gave it to them.
Is screaming even necessary? This is one reason why the Venice drum circles have been such an important resource. They pass primitive prosodies for folks to groove on, and can even help start some kind of healing process where the soothing sounds bond them into extended kin groups.
Origins are so un-cool in the early 21st century when therapies for adjusting to the fright of everyday life, and especially the anxiety of consumer society, seem synthesized into the products. Most everything is up front and in our faces these days, with very few fashions, behaviors, or insights remaining private. And there’s no need to dip below the surface. Go with the flow of appearances and create at will.
What good is a face-off with your birth trauma when all you need to do is reinvent yourself? In fact on most any day Chester, an ex-Raelian, ex-Marine, ex-Moonie, ex-junkie, occasional Zoroastrian, current cross-dresser, communist-hater, and recent lover of Jesus, recruits along the Blvd, convinced Jesus would love to take back any takers. And he claims to be doing a pretty fair job. Though the Krishnas over on Rose appear to be cutting into his action.
We may be in for a conversion. He never leaves home without his Bible, screaming phrases from it like he’s possessed. But recently he’s been reaching for a different weapon, a rolled-up pile of frayed papers taped with quotes from unidentified sources. Some of the words are crossed out and replaced, like perhaps he’s in the process of producing a manifesto. He waves the papers around like they’re his scepter, and he’s trying to capture the interest of the scattering crowd. At times he opens them up and passionately reads one of the reworked phrases…
We should work to get an early release for a few felonious taggers and contract them to upgrade the Center’s façade with the strokes that capture our more transparent times, satisfying both the neighborhood improvement committee and parole authorities.
Or we could do it ourselves. On the left side paste an enlargement of a still from a recent Saturn car commercial that cleverly used Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, to visualize how its anxious sound-retch waves of head-crisis are so yesterday. On the right plaster a picture of Jack sporting his best clowning smile, as if he has just inked the contract at a public ceremony for the first Jack-in-the-Box on the Blvd.
Sal’s Paradise
Ever since the alternative scene matured in the 1950s, folks have flocked here to join or caught the wave once they arrived. And from that point they were patriots of one shade or another, driven to learn how to see differently and remake their surroundings from the city’s nearly perfect storm of influences. So far they’re still driving Sal, a long-term resident and street citizen who can be a master satirist and performance artist when he’s on. He wears the strokes of a few celeb artists, at times a reasonable facsimile of Van Gogh's beard, or even one of Dali’s moustaches. His balding dome is a dead ringer for Picasso, especially when he contorts his expression and bulges his eyes at passersby on the boardwalk.
And he's in to found objects. I ran into him once on Speedway flush against Thornton Towers cradling what looked at first glance from the shadows like a crude replica of an early Calder wire design. Up close it resembled someone's discarded coat-hanger tool, perhaps used for gaining entry to an alarm-less vehicle in the wee hours. A ding-dong wrapper, condom, and a few other curious substances were dangling from it, clue to its recent location or evidence of his impromptu signature.
"Look what I got," he blurts as I enter his space. "Been trying to find this for years…gonna have a show down at the Louver!"
"Go for it. Great idea! But first you better go find the resume that got loose from it."
Another time I caught him rummaging through the dumpster behind Figtree's near Speedway. He pulled out some rumpled garment for me to see, claiming it was really an aphrodisiac jacket once worn by a guy named Andy in the canals who was trying to make fun of somebody famous.
“If it’s really aphrodisial, isn't it missing some vital things to give it erotic power? Like shot glasses and a bra?”
We’d schmoozed about Dali and especially his "sculpture" from the thirties.
“Bras are otta style…it's right…and the booze smell...who needs glasses!”
He puts it on and starts walking west, weaving back and forth across the boardwalk and finally toward the water, like he’s been suddenly seized by the desire to express himself in a new way. I chase after him and try to scrounge a few syllables, knowing he's usually as non-verbal as Harpo Marx himself. As we near the descent to the sea he abruptly veers left and heads straight toward a mound of chaos left over from the weekend's pubescent sand fantasies, taking flight ten feet or so before it. He flies into this eroding sand heap with fine aeronauticals, coming to his final rest like a Paloma Ave pigeon falling out of the sky. He defies the inanimate with the mute resolution Harpo patented.
Needless to say, Sal thrives in his own world as an embodied work of art who knows no bounds between creating and normal living. He’s oblivious much of the time to what goes on around him, lost in a stupor and barely able to speak clearly, functioning mostly on a subconscious level.
But he’s also capable of confident performances, shifting in and out of states with ease to make a point, or deliver arty takes on the moment. He flashes wisdom on the run to folks hanging out at hotspots around town, haiku-sounding snips that might become accidental aphorisms, moral mini-fables about how to act, or at least a piece of good advice to make it through the day or night. He can even take on the role of a curandero to guide his chosen ones through the confusion that grips even him so much of the time. It’s memorable to witness him break free from it and offer lucid herbs of insight about the world to any takers. And there can be many. Sal’s a healer, though these days he works wonders without peyote or other substances.
In a more activist mode Sal inserts himself into “respectable” conversations or gatherings and watches folks scatter. His beaten magnetism and penetrating stare-downs are just too much for them.
The source of Sal’s power seems to lie in his mobility and limited visibility. He’s constantly on the move, stretching his immediate country’s geographical and mental space, never staying too long in one place. He disappears for a while, then surfaces with a different look. This gives him the element of surprise and allows him to avoid the attachments that might force him above ground and compromise his freedom. It also protects him from the toxic substances of an amusement scene that, ironically, can breathe life into him when he surfaces.
This all seems fine and dandy for a freedom-seeking guerilla whose head is mostly in the right place, but it would not seem to be very realistic when it comes to simply staying alive. Sal can be so mysterious and invisible that he’s no longer in society. Perhaps during his disappearances, he learns to shape and sustain his own, refining the arts of primitive survival and getting ready for the day when it replaces “normal” society. Some believe that during these periods he slips above ground for a while in disguise to get financially recharged. There are always alleged sightings. Not long ago someone claimed to see him at Rudy Gast’s Motors on San Marcos working as a mechanic’s assistant. More recently he was supposedly spotted selling real estate at an office on Washington Blvd.
Sal has the talent to play chameleon, and his connections would willingly sponsor him, but this seems out of character for him. He’s likely learning to craft a nearly perfect dropout lifestyle for surviving in the cracks of the warped society. He’s hard to figure though. His behavior doesn’t obey predictable linear patterns, which is why most of the information about his activities after arriving so many years ago to visit a cousin before heading to North Beach to become a writer conflicts.
Like a lot of others inclined toward the dropout life, and once under the influence of our furies, he was apparently smitten with so many muses that his desire to go forward, travel to a final destination, slipped into a holding pattern, and he stayed. Like the jets during a foggy twilight down beach near LAX, he circled and circled, doing it so long his gait seemed to develop a certain hitch. Ever since then he has been prepared to stop, turn around and head off in another direction. It’s an invaluable trait for anyone skeptical of the straight and narrow. And in Sal's protective custody it seemed to become a virtual brush stroke he could use to splatter-paint the everyday canvas with a semblance of purpose.
By the way circling, though never destined to become the craze like rollerblading in the late 1970s, is not exactly an isolated eruption here. The most outrageous instance of this craft I’ve witnessed was a guy who virtually lived on the boardwalk in the 1980s and appeared to have no other purpose in life than dance around in a jagged circle for hours and hours on end before fading into the eucalyptus. Perhaps another relation to Harpo, he either had nothing to say or lots of things but few takers. The gossip varied about the nature of his “problem.” Some felt he was merely a wacko without a cause. Others that he was possibly driven by some obscure internal itch that buffered him from “disease.” And others that he was trying too hard to satisfy the beach scene’s expectations and ended up in some transference zone where mind meets the external twitch of extra-extraversion, doomed to duplicate the art of me-generation-gyrating ad infinitum.
Actually, the consensus emerged that it was all about some chemical imbalance. His meds took over and the normal folks puppeted him off the strand into life as we know it.
Sal's circle-jerking wags the puppeteers. No one will likely be able to steer him into a normal life, no matter what substances they might cook up to do the job. He’s simply too aware, if only intermittently, and too against the settled and respectable. It seems the years of success as a visionary misfit might have given him immunity from the temptation to conform.
These days it does seem he’s becoming more silent and inwardly reflective, however, like his head and the scene are joined in one big blob of incense vapor. Perhaps he’s trying to recapture the energy and vision from his earlier fascination with Zen. One rumor is that he wants to compose his memoirs without intrusions. Like the Symbolist poets, perhaps he’s trying to discover the purity of truth by avoiding the conventions of language; figure it all out by refusing to speak with the words that come dewed with cliché and choke our ability to name rich new experiences. Hopefully he’ll stutter some nonsense or errata and ignite a saner syntax!
Like when the first proprietors of the Venice West Café set about decorating the front window. They pasted it with "Café Expresso," not Espresso. An admitted mistake according to Tony Scibella, put up in haste in the euphoria of the moment. It was a special slip of the tongue which stuck and notched Venice's bohemian aura with a bargain folksy quality. These hipsters learned to slip and slide in the unofficial undergrowth where alternative identities effervesce with the power to reverse and reclaim. I misspell and therefore I am.
While Sal’s efforts to survive by being transient and stealthy might soon become more counter-productive than countercultural, he remains a treasure. There aren’t many like him roaming or avoiding the streets. And no matter how far toward the edge he may fade, a creative force appears to erupt through him and spread around to fellow citizens, illuminating their lives and encouraging them to pass it on. Though as inconspicuous as the sea spray, like Sal, they’re as ubiquitous as the tee-shirt hawkers on the beach, ready to swell into a mass of profaners and proactive alchemists. They do what’s necessary to survive in the new Venetian order, finding meaning here and there altering their states.
A nonfiction companion with my book just launched, A Venice Sextet. A version of this piece here was previously published by Moontide Press.