Monday, June 27, 2005

Partylands

Here’s a post about how you can’t really go back, even if sometimes you’d like to.  I have my reasons for saying so now.  More on that later.

I really didn’t experience it this way, but looking back it would seem that I went to a lot of parties when I was growing up.  There were birthdays, commencements, workshop events, jewish youth group events.... I’m not talking about big lifetime changes and major religious stuff, they’re independent of this - they’re “real.” Mostly, these parties were sort of made-up, except for birthdays, which were semi-industrialized anyway.  For these other minor sorts of celebrations, there were places designed to host parties, and people who needed to have a party for their kids went there to have them. 

Now, apparently, those places have been supplanted by the threateningly quasi-eponymous Chuckly Cheep Eatsa, a menagerie of overstimulated, undersupervised children and carbo-lactoid foodstuffs.  I haven’t been; maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge - but it sounds like the Hooters model, for kids.  There’s probably some feeder system between the two, with a “special delivery” pizza from Chuckly’s hot Hooters friend for your 16th birthday. 

But anyway, this is about the earlier parties.  All the parties I went to when I was a kid.  I remember that they weren’t all at the same loud, garrish, chaotic place every time - they were at a variety of different loud, garrish chaotic places.  I remember some of those places with particular fondness, and so, of course, today you’re stuck with them too.  I have no reason to think you’ll care about these places, but I have deep associations with each of them; they each play unique roles in my own interior iconography and nostalgic cartography.  They are places of freedom and mystery and escape.  I often wonder how they would look to me now. 

Ponyland: A tiny amusement park at Beverly and La Cienega, with pony rides I found inexplicably depressing as a three-year-old, and a funhouse/scary ride that made me shriek with anxious joy.  Even when I was so very small, I knew this place was modest in the extreme, but its scale suited me and I enjoyed it in inverse proporation to its size and my own.  The site is now occupied by the beverly center, the epitome of the elaborate commercial ghetto, the mall that sets the standard for malling internationally.  Meantime, I still sometimes find myself at old Ponyland in my dreams. 

Flookeys: this was a dogs and burgers place with garish yellow and black striped walls, and batting cages.  It smelled of mustard and ketchup, and people tended to shout there.  Despite my lack of baseball-hitting skill, it was fun to go there and endure the batting cage experience.  It made me feel liked and competent.  In retrospect, I have no idea why.  Additionally, I think it was used as the location for the video shoot for “Roscoe’s Theme” from Tapeheads, which is a great song in a deeply underappreciated flick, which only makes me appreciate Flookey’s all the more. 

Farrells: this was a throwback joint that sought to emulate some idealized version of 1905, with candystriped red-white wallpaper and bent wire chairs - more an ice cream parlour than a restaurant.  They specialized in parties for kids who liked to gorge on butterfat till they puked, with special rewards for overeating - if you finished all the ice cream in a certain wooden serving trough, for example, they’d give you a badge honoring how you “made a pig of [your]self”.  Even more impressive was “The Zoo,” a massive concatenation of, what?  24? scoops of goo, with toppings and sauce and a menagerie of small plastic souvenier animals scattered throughout - undoubtedly now recognized for the choking hazard that they were, but then truly prized commodities.  They’d run “The Zoo” out on a stretcher carried by two be-vested creamlackeys, accompanied by a third banging on a shoulder-bourne bass drum.  (here is a link to a clip of The Zoo being presented in full glory, like piping out the kiddy haggis.) The whole place was a noisy sticky mess, and we all loved it. 

Travel Town: Up on the Burbank side of Griffith Park, a bunch of old rail sidings have been set out as a sort of museum of rolling stock.  You could climb all over the engines and tenders and cabooses, all reasonably secured against the most obviously forseeable tragedies.  Nearby were live 1/8th scale steamers (of the non-cleveland variety); you could sit astraddle them and they’d take you on a quick circuit of a small track.  Some of my favorite parties were in special T-town dining cars reserved for the revels of youth.  Trains are, by definition, cool; and old trains, that much cooler.  T-town was a great place to party.

Mystery Theater: I don’t recall what this place was called, or exactly where it was.  It was in the valley somewhere, unobtrusively sited near the nice houses south of the boulevard, or in a light industrial area, or something.  It was a theater in which a simple, surrealistic show would be staged with puppets and what the brits call pantomime characters - people in goofy fuzzy suits.  There were blacklights and songs and the birthday kid got to sit on a magic toadstool; all the action was aimed to honor the lucky celebrant and then, after the show, everybody got some candy.  I always thought it was a weird place, but it was fun anyway.  I often wonder now what the hell really went on there.

Since those days I’ve developed an aversion to “party places;” I prefer home-based celebrations.  There’s something about a special place set aside for partying that seems so artificial as to deaden my celebratory spirit.  But when I was little, such qualms did not trouble me.  I have reason to believe that I’ve lost something precious in the transition. 

Today is a good day to revisit these recollections and ruminations because I leave early tomorrow for a week with my mom and extended family down in south florida.  It’s a new home for mom, and a mostly-unexplored world for me.  I’m expecting to have a nice time, to stay busy, to eat well, and most importantly, to reconnect with people I love.  Mom took me to all the places I’ve written of here, and many more; now she’ll take me to new places in a community unknown to me.  I’ll keep the old partylands in mind as I acquaint myself with these new realms, and I’ll try to make each one of them as much of a party as I can.  I’ll be back on July 5.  Till then, try to have fun.  Safe and sane is good too, but make sure you enjoy yourself.  I’ll return with a nice story about setting fire to things.

Friday, June 24, 2005

The Rock Garden

I came home from the conference downtown on a saturday midafternoon, tired and worn and glad to be home.  I dropped my messenger bag in the foyer and ambled back to our bedroom, where a radical and unwelcome change met my bleary eyes:

Our bedroom overlooks the backyard, except that the backyard hasn’t ever really been ours - Oma, who lives in the garage apartment, had claimed it as her domain long before we ever moved in.  Her bitter scowl and monolingual cantonese harrangues were more than enough to dissuade us from any more than the most fleeting sojourns into her emerald quadrangle.  Rather, we enjoyed it from above, looking out from our windows over the lawn and its slim border of fruit trees and flowering bushes.  Every few years I’d venture down to pluck a few plums, but otherwise I avoided the region goverened by Oma’s ancient claws and unwavering glare of disapproval.

Well, when I looked down at the backyard this particular saturday afternoon, it looked different: the grass was gone.  Utterly gone.  Not mowed, nor rototilled nor burned away - it had actually been paved.  The border remained, a hollow oasis of color and life, but the entire interior of the yard was concrete - grey and petrified.  Two small carefully-formed rosettes of earth remained in the middle as “features,” to be hemmed in with some scalloped pink borderbricks laid out ready for installation.  Half the yard had been tiled with large textured square pavers, giving the impression of the public walkways at a local government center; more pavers lay around, awaiting installation.  Over it all, the wind blew coldly. 

It made me think of treasures buried and the ellimination of beauty from a too-coarse, too-hard world, thoughts that stayed with me as I rode the bus to work two days later.  The ride, as always, rolled past my bank’s downtown branch, and past the alabaster-clad shell of the building across the cross-street where the bank used to live. When this now-empty building housed my bank, it was the epitome of mid-60s modernist antihumanism: a flat featureless facade, white as bleached bones but less friendly, 20 stories of vacant glass eyes staring catatonically like a drowning victim hoisted on a gaff at the wharf.  The bank offices on the ground floor were devoid of all personality, and the rest of the building was worse - it actually seemed to suck personality away from the street.

A year or so ago the bank moved to another nearby building, one with some vestige of architectural significance.  The old offices sat vacant; then, not long ago, scaffolding went up and something amazing started happening: the sheets of tired white siding that had clad it for so many years began to come down.  I’d had no idea that there was another building hiding inside the one I knew.  This new, old building that I finally saw being exposed, piece by piece, has a handsome red brick and rusticated sandstone facade, with modest ogees curling in at small insets a few stories up and a deeply ornamented semicircular arch over the entryway - a petrified garland, surmounted by an oculus window, currently boarded and probably vacant, but surely soon to be restored, all hidden for generations, hidden from generations, and only now finally re-emerging to share its handsome details with the dirty preoccupied street. 

MORAL: What is covered, will someday be divulged.  That backyard I never visited?  It’s still down there, and it will eventually return.  My job will be to make better use of it once it’s back - and, in the meantime, to see the other gardens that shelter under the featureless stone.

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Here Be There Santa-Eating Tygers

I really don’t know what to do about this anymore.  Here I think I’m being all edgy and funny and provocative, and I get THREE COMMENTS and they’re thanking me for reminding them of a nice song that makes them feel good. FEEL GOOD? I’ll show you feel good, all right.  I’ll show you right here.  Oh, and you’re welcome.  Glad you found the edgy funny post so heartwarming and touching.  jeez. 

So, what’s the opposite of heartwarming?  Going to the municipal dump!  Yay, we went to the dump twice this past weekend, and it was a delightful experience - though I must quote (patty?  selma?  YOU MAKE THE CALL): “that’s a stench I could have done without.” But the stench was only coming from the landfill, which we just drove past; the dump itself was tidy, well-organized, and fascinating.  “Fascinating?,” I hear you wondering in your benighted minds.  Yes goddamn it, it was fascinating, and here’s why: they have a hillside that’s covered with recovered weirdness of all shapes and sizes, and though I couldn’t climb up into it to get some of the shots I wanted, here’s a nice selection of some - but by no means all - of the abandoned pantomime figurines and grotesque manequins and strangely painted objects trovees that live up on the cactus-bristling slopes:

(oh and here’s a hint, if you hit F11 you can maximize your screen and get more detail on these.  It can help; these have some cool detail if’n I do say so meself.)

and of course, my favorites are the ones with the big old decaying fake tiger:

So: here’s where we start with the transition from dump photography to signage and urban decay, two of my longstanding favorite subjects. This first sign was next to the dump’s inbound weigh scale, and it seems to hold some kind of secret message if only we could unlock it:

Then, on the way home, we happened to be stuck on a freeway offramp for a while and I took a photo I rather like of the guardrail.  And of course, if I liked it, you’re stuck with it:

Finally, here are two old signs I have admired for years; I don’t know how much longer either of them will remain up so here’s your chance to appreciate them in the comfort of whereever the hell you are right now:

That’s all I’ve got, folks.  Thursday I expect to be out of cybercontact most all of the day, doing a site visit and living large with my homies, or whatever happens on these visits.  But I’ll make the most of it.  Even if they don’t have giant rotting tigerdummies.  However, I’ll count that against them on the final evaluation.  I’m pretty harsh that way.