a curse on quiet

There is one phrase we would run into constantly while apartment hunting – a phrase that would always put a clammy hand on my heart. The phrase was: its very quiet. Invariably, as we were being shown around this or that apartment in Los Angeles, which when last I looked held more than 2 million people, the selling point of quiet would come up. I’d immediately have a Gaslight flashback, the Victorian medical man with the florid moustache hiding his louche London night life of underage prostitutes and gambling under the veneer of the vest, suit, and checkbook, bringing his Ingrid Bergmanesque wife, a quiet lass, to his suburban retreat. He’s a strong advocate of vivisection, this guy, and the streets all about have suffered a mysterious epidemic of dognapping that has made them even quieter. Ingrid, of course, is diagnosed by her husband as needing rest and quiet  - o so much quiet. She needs to eat the unpalatable gruel brought by the serving girl who shows a little too much bodice…

Such, at least, are my associations. In truth, I am not a naïve – I know race code when I hear it, and often quiet simply means that no person of color is going to flood the zone with the oeuvres complets of Biggie Smalls at 2 in the morning. We are, the subtitles in this conversation go, among us white folk. This in itself is rather disgusting. But the subtext is not the full text, for there is something in being quiet – in the quiet of “the country in the city” (also a phrase that was thrown at us) which is utterly sincere. You may live in the city, but who wants to, well, live in the city?

As a matter of fact, I do. One of the small, tangible joys of our apartment in Paris is hearing, from our bed, the faint noise of people in cafes coming in through the window. Singing, or conversing loudly, or just being generally drunk and happy. This to me makes me feel, romantically, like I am living in the great city, the mecca for those with more boho tastes. Of course, it is the Marais, so boho is pretty fake, but still.

Last night, after our exhausting two week troll through the ads, and after having had our credit checked out, our intestines measured, and our criminal record examined by Interpol, the Pinkertons, and the NSA, we finally were able to settle into our living quarters here on 9^th street in Santa Monica for our first night. It was a great night, partly because Adam seemed to love sleeping here (a sure sign!) and partly because you could hear the noise of traffic on Wilshire, which is the next street up. The sea breeze was blowing – a bit too much, we have to get a thicker coverlet! – and there was a city quiet entering the room.

In actuality, country quiet is not a noiseless matter of people shutting themselves in houses and closing the door – it is a matter of horses neighing, dogs barking, coyotes howling in the distance (I was living in Pecos, New Mexico at the time – plenty of coyotes) and, of course, the occasional drunk wandering home from our local bar, the so called “bloody bow” – the Rainbow Club. Of course, that occasional drunk was sometimes yours truly, but still.

I pity the poor emigrant

Like Bob Dylan, I pity the poor emigrant. Especially when the poor emigrant is me – although poor is not the precise word. Poor conjures up the guy who struggles up from the hold, where half of his fellow travelers have died of the potato famine, who is thrown by some savage matelot into the line to be processed by a customs official on Ellis Island, a creep with leering eyes who changes  his name and gives him an official paper proclaiming him eligible for exploitation by his Darwinian  betters and has him and his four cardboard suitcases kicked out into the street, where he picks himself up and finds a job as a stringman in a windowshade factory for ten cents an hour, 26 hours a day. As we know, in just one hundred twenty years, such is the miracle of America, his great great grandchildren have risen to have degrees, hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, and great jobs as salesmen at designer pillow boutiques, or slinging escargot, for hedgefund geniuses, 26 hours a day, in some of our finest restaurants, and using their disposable income to gentrify selected streets in Astoria.

Such is not my plight, however. Emigrating to Los Angeles has its own meatgrinder aspect. One of them is the omnipresence of cars. I was prepared, or so I thought, for this. My life has not be a car-crossed one – the last time I owned a vehicle, an unfortunate AMC matador that bit me in the ass and died of a broken block, was more than twenty years ago. And before my tragic tete a tete with the Matador, I sufficed largely by driving borrowed vehicles, when I had to, and using my legs (walking, biking) to crawl across my environs at all other times. It worked! It even worked in Paris, where there is certainly a crazy car culture but where things tend to cuddle together, houses, apartments, stores, theaters and cafes, so that you can pretty much get to them in five minutes at a leisurely gait.

We have put all our money down on a place in Santa Monica, and are now planning our next big play: a car. So far, Hertz, an awful rental company, has been providing us our car, something called a Senta. I’ve read that the new generation, the generation that is so happily serving our financial elite in its off hours, has grown disaffected with the car.  I of course am older than the ancient mariner, so I remember when the names of different kinds of cars were known to my schoolmates, and could even be recognized at a distance. This is something I have never been good at. What others see as, for instance, an Acura or a Golf or some similarly ridiculous monikor, will appear to me as the small gray car or the larger blue car or whatever color the car happens to be. I only remember the car type I bought back in the day because it was such a pain in the ass. This Senta is a pain in the ass, too – this is one of the literal problems of driving aimlessly all over Los Angeles in search of the basics. This is what emigrants do – we search for the basics. Grocery stores, mattress stores, baby furniture shops, coffee places with wifi, etc. etc. The emigrant spends his first weeks not, as he imagined, lolling in the sun on the beach, but in a prolonged state of sticker shock among the big ticket items that are supposed to form the context of his domestic world.

looking for a place in LA

On looking for a place

Location location location – such is the power and frequency of real estate agent numbspeak that one begins, in the midst of the frantic scramble to find a place, to absorb it and apply it to other areas – to orgasm, or to ontology. It is a wagon train of vacuity, and in a sense it unlocks the secret principle upon which America’s manifest destiny was built: the search for an anyplace, a utopia, an Eldorado, the Big Rock Candy Mountain. It is the lure of the emptiness on the map which exists, the map, anyway as a picture of the adventurer’s advance and vocation – to claim by describing. It is the American songline: location location location. This is the no there there of Gertrude Stein’s famous phrase, with 3br, a spectacular view of a spectacular view, and it won’t last long on the market at these prices.

The homeless and the homefull – such are the pertinent divisions in the state of our nation at present. We drive around Santa Monica with one (increasingly maniacal) eye peeled for the For Rent signs, and the other observing the native custom of slowly, slowly traversing the street at the lights – often because the natives have no other choice of speed, hobbling on canes, being convoyed in wheelchairs. Santa Monica has more than its share of retirement heavens. It is into this set that Whitey Bulger famously faded while avoiding the nationwide manhunt for him, and what my wife and I want to know is not the secret of his relationship with his FBI controllers as he finked out his crew or if he strangled his sub-captain’s girlfriend, but how the heck he managed to successfully wrangle a “fabulous 2 bedroom 2 bath with patio must-see” out of the maws of Westside Rentals, which has its mits on the whole rental business in this town.

Meanwhile, our standards fall as we strive for our own location glimmer. What you can get for a cool 1500 per month in other gooberish divisions of Los Angeles, such as I don’t know, Baldwin Hills, is simply laughed at in Santa Monica. Fork over 4000 and we will talk about a washer drier in your unit, sucker. Temporarily homeless and camping in our Airbnb rental in Venice, we feel the stress of the moment, our suitcases piled everywhere, poor Adam having to sleep with his parents like he did when he was three months old, and every day another irritation as one or another of our daily routines has to be modified. In this state of motion without a pre-determined endpoint, work suffers. I have three editing jobs to do, and I want to finish the sixteenth chapter of my novel, where the characters seem to me to be frozen in midgesture and the lovely farce of revelations and incidents I dreamed up weeks ago is beginning to fade, as the faucet of my invention (in a full bathroom with Jacuzzi bath and Mediterranean faux ceramic tile) is shut off. I need an imaginary plumber to unclog the pipes of my imagination, evidently. I need the wings of an angel to lift me above the wagon train of location location location that has led us all here to butt up, in our trashy glory, against the Pacific, which lends all this tawdriness its weather. We are not worthy. Really.

Politics and criticism

I am in agreement with Kierkegaard one thing. The ethical dimension can not subsume the aesthetic or sacred dimension. For this reason, I like criticism that discerns the politics in an art work, but I hate criticism that subsumes the aesthetic dimension to the political one. Politics is primary in its own sphere, but is secondary in the aesthetic sphere, where seeing, touching, tasting and orient ourselves are primary. How we strategize about using the power of these primary forces has a strong political aspect –so strong that we might reject some entertainment because it is racist, sexist, etc. – but its other aspect is always about delight. Although we live in a world in which every horizon seems to be blocked by the market, and every interaction is now called a negotiation, a joke is funny or not before it is correct. Any account of a work that dissolves it into its ideological attitudes and claims, thus, to give a total account of the work, strips it of its civil rights – its primary power. It is an act of violence as surely as blinding a prisoner is an act of violence.

the stone age: classification and ideology

We have the stone age. The iron age. The information age. What is today the age of?

I seem, in that question, to be talking about time. But it is actually a peculiar view of time I have in mind. The stone age and iron age have a function in the historical timeline of archaeology, marking the discovery and use of materials and giving us a kind of linear sequence. You can’t go from the stone age, in this sequence, to say the age of steel. First, you have to discover how to forge things with iron.

This view of historical time presumes a community between the person who uses it and the person who hears it. The “today” of my question is not, in actuality, a dated time. If it were, that dated time would extend across the Amazonian tribe and the Manhattan hedgefunder. They coexist in the same planetary time.

I have been thinking about this since I started reading a book that the Pulitzer prize committee thought highly enough of to short for its prize in 2011 – S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon, Quanah Park and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, The Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History.  Gwynne, as the reviewers like to say, is a master story teller – or at least he has a master story to tell. At the same time, he brings to the topic of the Comanches an attitude that I am all too familiar with among white Western historians: a continuation of the same nineteenth century ideology that justified wiping out the Indians and snatching their land in the first place. To this end, Gwynne writes some astonishing things about the moral retardedness of the Comanches, and of their lack of vocabulary (being primitive people, they have a impoverished list of names for things), and their generally small swarthy and bowlegged appearance. It is all rather astonishing. Gwynne goes back to the roots of the West to explain how we all evolved a great morality and ironwork and such, while the Comanche were stone age people who thought nothing of committing barbarous infanticides, rapes and tortures. This is done, of course, without any statistical comparison of infanticides, rapes and tortures between the “West” and the Comanches – and with a giant blind eye, one with a giant stye in it, turned to that peculiar institution called slavery.

However, I’d rather concentrate on the notion of the stone age as it is used here. This is such a peculiarly misleading way to speak of the Comanches that it misses what they were about. It is not only an instance of what anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls allochrony – the production of a hierarchized time in a present in which, in actuality, societies are coeval. This is certainly true, but what is missed here are the important technologies that are generated within and structure a society. In the case of the Comanches, from what we – we inheritors of Western knowledge – know about the pre-horse Comanches, they were not huge users of stone as much as bone – and thread, and hide. As with American society in the nineteenth century, much depended on fabric.  The cotton thread was the great material of the South, and in the American economy. The hides of buffalo and dear were the great materials of pre-horse Comanche society.

However, it was the horse, and the influx of iron, that changed everything. The Comanches did not use stone implements to meet the forward advance of the American freebooters – they used spears topped with iron blades, for which they traded. They used firearms, when they could get them. And most especially they used horses, which they raised and trained and rode in an exemplary fashion.

They were, in other words, a dependent society – dependent on technologies they could not replicate. At the same time, they had absorbed certain elements of the changing character of the Great Plain and the Southwest – notably the horse – and in doing so, had utterly changed their internal social patterns and relations.  To speak of them, then, in terms that make more sense when doing archaeological digs in Asia minor is a sort of classificatory obfuscation. It misleads more than explains.

And this is what comes of not seeking one’s classificatory measures with reference to one’s object – it is as if we were to measure the wing length of the homo sapiens and find the species to be a very primitive bird.