Archive Page 23

A Woman in the Sun

Published May 4, 2010 California , Family , Female Travel , Lonely Girl Loves , Places , USA 10 Comments
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I sat in the sun, butt naked and heat dazed, my starving skin soaking up all the UV it’d been hungry for since my trip to LA. The sulfur smell of the hot springs had stopped burning my nose, and I was in that drool state of relaxation where everything floats in and out of your consciousness like a dream. The bits of conversation from down the deck came to me in whiffs, like BBQ or the burning of some far-off fire.

“You know, Mark called me on Friday. And he started up again. And I said, you know, like we’d practiced, ‘I am not going to participate in this conversation with you.'”

The words roused me a little. Not so much really the words, but the careful way in which they were recited—deliberate, practiced, the memorization of an actor who knows the scene but hasn’t quite figured out their character’s motivation.

The patter of bare feet and a sleek ripple of water. “Oh, Myra, I didn’t tell you,” the voiced repeated. “I got to use that tool we talked about, when I told Mark: ‘I am not going to participate in this conversation with you.’ It felt so good!”

Wilbur Hot Springs is a retreat place, and that’s what I’d come for. That’s what we’d all come for, driven the two-line highway through pastoral postcards, past cheese-commercial cows, down a bumping dirt road where the dust plumed and twisted behind us like everything we’d meant to leave behind.

Wilbur is the kind of place that makes you lapse into cheesy cliches (partly because your brain is too full of steam to think straight). A Victorian mansion “nestled” into the “rolling” California hills, it’s an uber-NorCal experience, an “oasis.” Everything is solar-powered. The natural hot springs are directed into four flumes clustered around a clothing-optional deck. There’s a communal kitchen where guests cook their own meals, and instruments for evening jam sessions. Everyone talks in low, soothing voices, and the place smells like well-oiled wood. Sustainability and spiritualism; regrouping, reconnecting, getting off the grid and soaking in 114 degree water—you know, the kind of hippie shit a punk rock kid like me used to scoff at. Until I went up on a gift certificate a couple years ago with a similarly suspicious friend.

We’ve been jonesing to get back ever since.

Retreat is what these chatting women on the deck had also come for, and like retreat, they were something, a certain kind of woman, a younger incarnation of me would have scoffed at: middle-aged, middle-class, white, all-American. Bad hair and worry lines. I’ve grown less judgmental in my old age, and in my hot-spring-infused sedation, observed them detachedly, from an almost anthropological distance.

They’d come on day passes. They weren’t entirely comfortable, held their robes and towels around them self-consciously, seemed self-conscious about being self-conscious—they averted eyes, glanced this way and that before letting go and slipping naked into the steaming water.

I’d pieced together their conversations, about ex-husbands and astrology, how to figure your aura energy by the kinds of animals you attracted (“You got lizards and butterflies; I got bit by a tick!”). This day trip to Wilbur appeared to be the culmination of a healing workshop. The leader of the group was some kind of psychic—not a predictive one, she assured, but one that dealt more in energies, a kind of cosmic therapist. They weren’t super New-Agey about it, talked in a kind of down-to-earth tone that made them seem less like people on board some kind of bullshit train, and more like people genuinely seeking, genuinely lost and hurt and looking for something, some kind of solidity.

“I am not going to participate in this conversation with you.” The statement rang in my ears, plucking me out of my sun-drenched stupor. The speaker’s voice held in it all the excitement of a pupil who’d just felt a switch flip—who’d practiced the arithmetic but wasn’t sure the equation would work for them, with their own dull and trembling pencil. But it wasn’t a young voice and a glance at the body from which it issued revealed a gravity, breasts heavy and hips wide, a child-bearing body.

My God, I thought, to have lived that long and only now have learned to say that.

The woman’s comment, the thrill with which she yielded it, struck me as tragic, in a particularly female kind of way—that a woman could go that long in her life without having learned to say no before.

Boundaries. Standing up for yourself. Not taking shit. They’re vital things for us girls to learn. You flat out won’t make it in this world without them, I’ve come to believe, and I don’t just mean with manipulative ex-husbands. You’ve got to learn where the world stops and you begin, what is and is not okay with you, and how to be firm and true to that. Cause you’re not going to make it—ride the buses or walk the streets or, shit, travel the world—you’re not going to survive the barrage of shit hurled at you without learning the word “no.”

And there, on that sun deck, a wave of gratitude swept over me, like the spring breeze on my pink and steaming body, for my mother. My tough-as-nails, take-no-shit mother.

My mother, my model: pretty and blond and trained in karate. She worked in factories, held her own in the male-dominated world of politics, worked in West Oakland during the worst of the crack years, dared a scab to follow through with their threat to punch her on the picket line (they punked out). It stems from that: my childhood love of Tina Turner and my vow that if, when I was older, I ever went on a date with a guy who tried to make me do something I didn’t want to, I’d “kick him in the nuts with my high heels”; my busted-Converse affection for Riot Grrls, Le Tigre, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. And it stretches before that: my grandmothers, no-nonsense Midwest girls who endured Depression poverty and marched in Civil Rights protests.

I come from a long line of tough ladies. I can’t ever forget I stand upon the ground they forged for me. It’s a generational adventure, this learning of how to be a woman in the world, and what my mother and grandmothers fought for is in me, my blood. So much so that it still surprises me, blinking-eyed shocks me, when other women ask me how I have the “bravery” to travel alone. It simply never occurred to me to not have the bravery.

In that sun-drenched moment, any residual judgment melted away, just like the knots in my lower back unclenched in the hot, healing water. It may have seemed tragically late to learn how to make boundaries, she may have had to take a healing workshop with a psychic, but this woman had learned. And she sat now, naked and free, gently turning pink in the sunlight of it.

Painting the Town: Street Artists Bomb the Bay

Published April 29, 2010 Bay Area , California , Oakland , Places , San Francisco , Street Art , Subculture , USA 11 Comments
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One of the nice things about living in the Bay Area is that people come here. Just, you know, to visit. We’re coming up on the high season, when the streets swell with tourists, clicking their cameras and speaking their different languages, hanging limbs off cable cars and sharing undoubtedly brilliant commentary in the halls of museums. We don’t complain so much about tourists in the Bay Area—aside from the fact that they spend a shitton of money (and have hopefully read the part in their guidebooks about tipping), it makes us feel good: we live somewhere people want to come to.

It makes us feel especially good when those people are street artists who leave us little gifts.

The Bay Area has been freaking out over the past few days about 6 Banksy pieces that have surfaced in San Francisco. We’re a medium-sized city, so it makes us feel special that an artist that big would come out and leave his mark. I, for one, had to take advantage of a sunny spring day and go on a taco-fueled, MUNI-powered mission across the city (cause, you know, why not?) to see as many as I could. But here on the quieter, slower side of the Bay, a couple other street artists/collectives have made visits. They may not be as big as Banksy (who is?), but spotting their work made me feel, I’m not gonna lie, a little warm and cozy about my hometown.

The blogosphere has been abuzz over Banksy lately. With the release of Exit Through the Gift Shop, everyone’s favorite British recluse has been hitting up spots where the film’s debuted. (His recent work in LA caused quite the stir when it was physically removed to be sold in a shady art gallery.) The San Francisco debut of the film went down recently, and we were all waiting, holding our collectively aerosol-stained breath, to see if any Bay Area pieces would surface.

They did. Warholian broke the news, spread the word and even got himself on TV:

I had to wait a few days, for a full day off (new waitressing gig = mucho trabajo) to embark on the mission. Luckily, Warholian posted exact locations on his Flickr stream (along with far better photos than I took). Oh, the digital age…

What was funnest about missioning around to find the pieces wasn’t really the art; it was seeing all the people come out. Folks were really excited to see the work, like a treasure hunt where the reward wasn’t some crappy Easter egg but sick-ass stencils that spawned social commentary—and a nice dose of civic pride. One guy I met was super stoked that a piece ended up abutting his soon-to-open bar (“It’s like free publicity!”). A group of European kids posed for photos by the Native American stencil while a hip dude explained in Spanish to a passer-by what all the fuss was about. On Haight Street, I met an old dude with a serious camera—miles of lenses and clicky gadgets—who told me, “I’ve never been that into this whole street art thing. Always looked like a bunch of scribble to me. But I read about this in the paper and thought, well, that’s pretty cool. So I wanted to come out and document it.”

Doubt this one will be winding up in a gallery

Yeah, my camera sucks. You should really just Google this shit.

Say what you will about Banksy—publicity stunt conspiracy theories and cries of being too mainstream—but that Bristol boy got San Francisco juiced, taking pictures and making missions and actually chatting with each other (usually a more Oakland phenomenon). And at least one cool old dude seeing street art as something other than vandalism.

But I’ve been noticing more cool pieces around lately, on my own side of the Bay. One of my favorite street art blogs alerted me to that fact that Feral was in town, and I spotted one of his pieces (now gone) by the MacArthur BART station.

Abandoned furniture and trash-feasting pigeons: that's my town!

And up on Telegraph, the epicenter of gutter punks and flip-flop-wearing bros, I spotted one of TrustoCorp‘s guerilla street signs. These have been making me giggle for months, and I was stoked to see some stuff locally.

I’m not sure who did this piece, but I liked the placement of it—a busy intersection across from a Whole Foods—and its stark insistence on being noticed.

I’m continuing to think a lot about street art and what exactly it is that draws me to it—what exactly it is that seems so undeniably related to travel. It’s got something to do with place, with the insistence of place, the immediacy and intimacy of interacting with a place on such a visceral, physical level (the subject of one of my first ever blog posts). The words are forming, the drooling gibberish shaping itself into discernible sounds under my wet pink tongue (“mama,” “dada”).

In the meantime, I’m thinking a trip to Italy for Fame Festival might answer some questions and cure some wanderlust. Just in case the Bay doesn’t receive any visitors for awhile…

This is Not About Travel

Published April 25, 2010 Lonely Girl Loves , Sobriety , Successes 7 Comments
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Ten years ago today was the worst day of my life.

This is not about travel.

Have you ever been broke down, beat up, tore back—I mean wiped out, swinging from a greasy rope, “with no knot in it”? Have you ever had to admit total defeat?

This is not about travel.

Have you been 17 and scared? Have you been running, running from an unnameable blackness inside you? Have you ever found the thing that would save you, keep you, sing to you sweetly in the jagged alleys of adolescence, a song of calloused fingertips and swollen livers that lullabyed you into a half-consciousness that made everything more manageable? Have you ever fallen in love with a sickness?

No, no, this is not about travel.

Have you woken up, bloody-elbowed and wobbly-toothed? Have you walked through the house with kitchen knives in both hands, watched the walls bleed and the shadows twitch, recoiled from your own hungry pupils in the mirror?

And has life ever stepped like a steel toe on your chest? Have you ever laid choking and gasping on the bottom bunk, the weight pressing down, pressing, pressure (that’s how diamonds are made).

Have you ever realized that the thing you thought would save you was gonna kill you faster than what you were running from?

This is not about travel in the traditional sense—not the route between physical places. This is about a different kind of journey, a spiritual journey, but one where there’s no arriving, no achieving. Where, no matter how far down the path you get, you’re always the same distance from the ditch.

My last drink was like this: Sunday afternoon, the parking lot of a West Berkeley warehouse, “backpack beer”—the warm remains of yesterday’s 12-pack. It was a place we’d go to drink during shows at Gilman; it wasn’t my part of town, and I didn’t know where else to go. We’d taken the bus an hour, to buy a half ounce from the kids above the pet shop, walked a couple blocks west to chill out before the trek home.

But the spot looked different during the day, naked and stark, not shielded under a blanket of dark that obscured everything, made you less able to look at it, see it. We crouched beside a stairwell, I drank two beers, got the cuff of my jeans wet when I squatted and pissed.

We took the bus back to Oakland, through a spring afternoon I didn’t deserve. It was too soft, too aching, too bird-singingly pure. Spring break had come and went, and the fragmented remnants of the week-long blackout were still jangling in me, sharp as glass. School would be out soon, graduation was coming, and I’d wear a white cap, march single-file into a future that was only getting heavier, deeper, more liquor-soaked and desperate.

I’d go home and eat dinner. I’d sneak a glass or two of wine, to take off the edge that was already sneaking back. I’d bag up the half-ounce and smoke a little of what was left. Listen to some music, maybe write a little. I would not meet fate, would not break down sobbing in a wretched little ball as it all caved in, crashed down, crushed the very bones of me. I would not get sober that night.

Ten years ago today was the first day of my life.

Leaving Town, in Your Sleep

Published April 23, 2010 Poetry , Subculture 3 Comments
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It’s nearing the end of National Poetry Month, so I thought—why not torture everyone with another unpublished poem? It’s a favorite pastime of mine (unlike, apparently, regularly writing poetry anymore).

This one’s about a year old. Anyone that’s ever wanted to skip town in the middle of the night will know what I’m talking about.

Leaving Town

I packed my bags while you were sleeping.

/

I took the image of your face, half your face, cheeks stubbled and gasping.

/

I took your smell: deodorant and hair gel, wine-breath, wine-sweat—flesh.

/

I took the light, the streetlamp angling through bare branches, through the window, the thin curtain; I took the shadows on the wall.

/

I folded, carefully, your rolled-up sleeves and work shoes, your paperback and pile of black.

/

I took your arms, huddled around your head and clenched. I took the parted lips and phantom twitch, the stalking eyelids.

/

I tucked it all away, inside, a suitcase with a lock. I sent it off ahead of me, to some unknown destination, some other life, where it might find me. Where it might rattle around in the cargo compartment, my heart. Where it might never arrive, get lost among all the other bags, carrying all the other tender items, wrapped in old t-shirts and the smell of old lovers. Where it might sit and wait, in the dim corner of a dim station, to be reclaimed, reopened. Where it might grow old, in the part of me that won’t grow old, that will go on loving you like this, in this room and this unlivable life.

Bootleg Blues: Thoughts on the Illegal Alcohol Trade Around the World

Published April 20, 2010 Culture Shock , Lonely Girl Loves , Morocco , Places , Sobriety 4 Comments
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It was not a subject I expected to get so drawn into. But there I was, hunched over the pale glow of my laptop, clicking links and watching videos and reading random blogs, that damn color pinwheel spinning from the stress of too many open tabs—like going down a virtual rabbit hole into a murky, liquor-soaked world of shadows and motorbikes and sick yellow skin.

Modern-day bootlegging. Prompted by a New York Times piece about alcohol in tribal Pakistan, NileGuide assigned me an article on the illegal trade of alcohol around the world. It was to be a straight-forward round-up, carefully presenting the information without judgment, condemnation or alarmist cries of “this shit is crazy!” But it kind of is crazy, is the thing, and got me thinking a lot about the prohibition/restriction of substances in a society, and about my own experience traveling in Morocco.

As you’d probably guess, all of the places I discovered with a bootlegging industry either outlaw or strictly regulate alcohol sales and consumption. The how and why of it was fascinating. There were religious reasons, of course, in places like Pakistan and United Arab Emirates, but more interesting to me were Sweden, Russia and these remote rural towns in Alaska. All of these places enacted regulations in response to severe alcoholism within the culture. In the Alaskan towns, the temperance calls came from the community rather than the government—largely composed of a Native American population, folks in these towns were sick of the ravages of alcoholism and wanted to just do away with the whole existence of the glimmering, vile elixir. Can you really blame them?

The problem, as any good alcoholic knows, is that people will find a way to drink anyway. (Shit, I never took a legal drink in my life.) Regulations lead to a bootleg industry rife with gangs, violence and product made with piss-poor ingredients that can sicken and kill those who consume it. It’s not too unlike the drug trade in that regard—which got me thinking, on this uber-stoner holiday, about places I’ve been that have suffered immeasurably due to the drug trade: Mexico and Colombia. As always, the suffering seems to break down along class lines: the people who really get fucked are the poor folks in these cultures.

In Morocco, I had the chance to hang with some sober people. What these people—three expats and one Moroccan woman—told me about the actuality of alcohol consumption in the country kind of blew my mind. “Of course people drink,” the retired American sisters told me. “You’re just not supposed to drink, so no one talks about it. People just kind of turn a blind eye.”

As we pulled into the beach resort of Agadir, they sneered slightly. “They’ve been building the town up,” they told me. “It’s becoming something of a playground for Saudi men, where they can drink and have their call girls without anyone knowing.” They later told me about medina bums that drink cologne—not too unlike old-school stories I’ve heard about how folks, during the Depression, would strain shaving cream and drink the liquid to get drunk. (One report of an Alaskan town claimed mouthwash and air fresheners have to kept behind the counter at grocery stores because people use them to make alcohol.) The gaping, aching disparity between how the rich and the poor consume alcohol astounded me.

In the Gujarat state in India, only the wealthy could afford the imported and smuggled bottles of whiskey, while in Russia, only high rollers could fork over what was a three-fold increase in alcohol tax. Poor folks in these places were left to consume shady moonshine, made from medical disinfectants, that led to sicknesses like toxic hepatitis and “yellow death.” Recent outbreaks had killed over 100 people in both places and sickened over 1000. In Gujarat, people rioted during last summer’s outbreak of poisoned alcohol deaths, accusing the police of abetting bootleggers and clamoring for the repeal of Prohibition laws: “Blanket prohibition has never worked in this free world.” The government responded instead with harsher laws: the death penalty for anyone caught bootlegging.

Then, on top of all that, you toss in the lucrative business of bootlegging, complete with gangs, bribed government officials and violent skirmishes, and you gotta ask yourself: how dissimilar is all this from the drug trade?

It’s too simplistic to just advocate for legalization—there are huge cultural and religious forces to negotiate. But it seems, at least in the cases of Alaska and Russia, that putting tight restrictions on alcohol hasn’t done a whole lot the curb alcoholism. It’s a fast, tangible, measurable action, but seems to have caused a hell of a lot more suffering. The slower, more expensive and difficult answer would be to increase social services, preventive education and not-for-profit recovery centers.

At the very least, legalization means regulation, both of the substance and the criminal underbelly that controls its distribution when a government doesn’t. I’ve never drank moonshine, but I don’t even want to think about all the dumb and dangerous shit I did to get alcohol, all the yellow rocks cut with Ritalin and rat poison that I consumed, about the fourteen-year-old kid “in the scene” whose heart exploded when he took a bunch of bad acid. The safety of banned substances, along with crime, led the US the repeal Prohibition, and I can’t help but wonder if a more feasible answer to combatting the drug trade problems in Colombia and Mexico would be at least a partial legalization.

The sober Moroccan woman I met painted a fascinating picture of alcohol in her country. She was upper-class, from an important family, had been to European boarding schools and spoke seven languages. According to her, everyone in her class drank. It was considered cultured and European to drink—though, since alcohol wasn’t an established part of the culture, it didn’t take the form of a nice Cote de Rhone with dinner; people binge drank. People did it, but didn’t talk about it, a sort of deeply steeped denial. You can only imagine how difficult it would be for someone to admit they have a problem with alcohol, in a culture where you’re not even supposed to be drinking. Toss in being a woman on top of that and, well, you’ve gotta be one tough chick.

Let me tell you—she is.

Travel and the Lonely Girl

Published April 15, 2010 Home , Lonely Girl Loves , Successes 12 Comments
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"When that open roads starts to callin me..."

I have been in a post-trip funk.

It’s embarrassing to admit, especially since the trip that propelled me into the sucking black of it wasn’t much of a trip: 10 days, in-country—shit, wholly within California. No form of public transportation was ridden, no bulky backpack bulged to the max: Traveling Lite, Reduced Hassle.

But it wasn’t just that trip that launched me soul-first into the aching void. It was the accumulation of trips, the momentum and gathering steam, wheels spinning and dust pluming. It was a short drive through my own backyard than confirmed what I knew was true, solid and sore as a cancer, sitting unmovable in my gut, in the way that things we suspect (but don’t want to admit) are true do: I like myself better when I’m traveling.

God damnit. I’ve been restless, irritable and discontent since I’ve come home, an itch in my veins, mounting, rising with the blood and coming out (this part is true) in a pink dry rash on my arms and legs. On one particular night last week, when I felt like I was going to crawl out of my own skin, it dawned on me: I’m far less lonely traveling, even solo, than I am at home.

What the fuck is up with that? It’s one of those logic-defying spiritual axioms. But it’s not just the loneliness, because I’ve always been lonely, not in a no-friends kind of way, but in an ache-in-the-center kind of way. (“She had a funny way of looking, too, that was like bird looked: you know, with the head turned, never dead at something, but kind of past it, past it like she could see something nobody else could see; and whatever it was she saw sometimes scared her like a ghost. ‘I’m lonely,’ she says.“) No, it’s more than even that central fact. It’s that I feel like I’m a better version of myself when I travel—as though being on the road irons out all the rough spots, calms all the kinks and hushes me with a lullaby of engine roars and brake squeals.

Sure, there’s the departure from reality aspect: no work, no bills, no floors to be swept and trash to be taken out. Free of mundane tasks and responsibilities, travel allows you to turn to loftier activities, reflecting on life and culture (and street art and soda pop). Traveling isn’t “real” life—or rather, it’s realer life, a sudden plunge back into the ice water of all that surrounds us, but we’re just too wrapped up, too nose-to-the-grindstone, to see at home. It’s either an escape or a return, a reverse kind of homecoming—I haven’t decided which yet.

But it’s something more than that too, I think. Somehow, when I travel, I feel more connected, even when I don’t speak the language, don’t look like anyone around, don’t know anyone for hundreds or thousands of miles. I’m more curious, less shy and inhibited, more apt to  engage (even wordlessly) with a stranger or go traipsing off on some impulsive adventure. I’m totally consumed with my surroundings, and all the shooting sparks and trembling brain waves usually spent hamster-wheeling around myself are redirected, sent to other, sleeping parts of the brain that yawn and stretch and come to life only when I travel.

It’s not that I don’t love my home or my life. It’s that I think about myself less when I travel. Freedom from the bondage of self is what it’s all about, right?—the closest I’ve ever gotten to feeling whole and content and, holy shit, not lonely.

Of course, there are spiritual practices that can achieve the same effect. (“When we retire at night, we constructively review our day… Were we thinking of ourselves most of the time? Or were we thinking of others, of what we could pack into the stream of life?”) But I want it now, I want it the fast and tangible way, the board-a-plane-and-stuff-a-bag-and-drain-my-bank-account way. I don’t want to sit crosslegged on a lotus leaf and wait for, not enlightenment, but something to ease the itch and fill the void, the little lonely I carry, that I sometimes think we all carry.

I’d planned to go back. I’d switched my shifts and made hasty arrangements, was going to go back to LA. I told myself it was attend the renaming ceremony of John Fante Square (as much for the ceremony itself as to witness whatever bizarre cross-section of humanity would come out for such a thing—myself included, of course). I told myself it was to take more pictures and get more material and possibly go to a print studio that sounded pretty killer. But really I just wanted to relive my last trip—to get back to that place, that elusive illusive place, where I’m not just happy, but something that resembles content. It’s not actually a place at all, an anti-place—or else it’s every place, the possibility and freedom of the open road that courses through the world and ourselves and that, goddamn, I wanna get back on, wind-rattling and dust-covered.

Meet the Reason

Published April 10, 2010 Family , Home , Lonely Girl Loves 8 Comments
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… I won’t be traveling for a couple months. (Well, not the only reason, but the biggest, which is actually the smallest and the sweetest reason…)

Baby Naomi, my brand spankin new little niece, born on Tuesday, April 6th. I’ve got other nieces and nephews, step- and half-, but none whose birth I’ve been around for. None I’ve gotten to hold when they’re pink and trembling and less than 24 hours old, blinking in the strangeness of light and the world—everything blank, yet-to-come, a suggestion of stars and planetary alignment, the etchings in a palm that’s too small to read yet, to gently uncurl or do anything but hold.

The world can wait. An impulsive trip to the renaming ceremony of John Fante Square in LA can be ditched. My inbox can fill like rising water and my page view stats can sink. There comes a time to sit still, when even the itchiest feet need to stay rooted.

This is definitely something I wanna be around for.

Smog City Street Art

Published April 7, 2010 Abandoned Places , Bay Area , California , Found/Salvaged Art , LA , Offbeat , Places , Southern California , Street Art , Subculture , USA 3 Comments
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Second and Traction. I wouldn’t have ended up there if three degrees of separation and a vaguely pointing finger hadn’t sent me, the intersection pulsing on my iMap like a gleam off buried treasure. Does every town have a warehouse district—posed delicately between decay and revitalization, a hushed breath that sends the trash dancing ecstatically down deserted streets. Abandoned buildings, chain-link fences, art collectives, lofts, hip cafes on whose terraces a gothic bartender I once knew squinted her eyes against the LA sun (she never did get sober). Dogs and day laborers and cute girls on bicycles—and a shitton on graffiti.

I’m thinking this little tract of Downtown LA is something like the hill (or dug-outs or BART tracts) where the cool kids in high school smoked weed. There were pieces from big names like So-Cal native Shepard Fairey and the UK’s D*Face (who recently made a stir with his Zombie Oscars installations), as well as wheatpastes and stencils and tags galore. I came across a friendly crew of dudes painting a legit mural on the side of an abandoned building that read “Still Kicking Ass.”

Damn straight.

Shepard Fairey

A lot of the work was heavily politicized—making poignant to satirical comments on the imperialism, immigration, consumerism, commodification and other fun subjects not typically conjured in my LA stereotypes. Just more proof that there’s more going on than teeth whitening and Botox injections.

Interesting comment on the commodification of political figures--especially considering the man responsible for the oh-so-famous Obama image had a piece up a block away.

Mad skills

Reminiscent of Banksy mice, no?

D*Face: Siiiick

Word.

Dudes painting mural

"Can I get a picture of your bird tattoos?" "Sure." "Aw, dude, show her your Booger tattoo."

At work

More pieces on the same building

One of Nomade's Roman fellows

Down on 9th and Mateo, another abandoned building was getting seriously hit up by some bad-ass murals, part of the LA Freewalls Project. Local boy Saber had just completed an impressive piece, as had D*Face.

Saber's mural

Detail: buffed graffiti

And, why not, a couple more gems from elsewhere in the city…

Sherpard Fairey & Saber alley, Silverlake (thanks for the correction, Daniel)

Note the can: Campbell's Soup. How Meta.

If all taggers and graffiti artists looked like this, they'd have a much easier time.

Health care reform passed while I was in LA. Was delighted to see the Monopoly fellow around.

So what does it all tell you, these smears of paint and peeling papers, about Los Angeles? If street art and place really do have as much of a connection as I suspect they do, LA’s told me this: that even within the belly of mass culture and consumerism, pangs of outsider aches burn acidic. And they don’t sit quietly, politely, hands folded and waiting their turn. They’re illicit, guerilla and goddamn beautiful.

Estudy of Estyle: Chilean Street Art and Figuring Out What the Hell It Is I Have to Say

Published April 3, 2010 Chile , Inspiration , Lonely Girl Loves , Offbeat , Places , South America , Street Art , Subculture 3 Comments
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There’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about, but struggling to find the words to explain: the connection between travel and street art. I’ve had fumbling conversations in which I attempt to articulate it, flapping my lips like hands gasping at butterflies, trying to gather vague supports for an unformed thesis. An idea has been forming in me, very far inside my brain, amid the murmuring currents of subconsciousness—like a toddler without the vocabulary to express herself, feeling emotions she doesn’t understand, but only knows are true.

And then a friend posts a video on Facebook that starts to explain everything I’ve been thinking and struggling to say. Thank God.

Chile Estyle has released the first documentary in what I’m hoping will be an ongoing exploration of the evolution of the burgeoning and blossoming Chilean spin on the global phenomenon of street art. And in its coverage of the specifically Chilean take on the art form, Chile Estyle touches on what I’d felt street art is doing all over the world: revealing (like a striptease) just a little more of the soul of a place.

I’ve been hearing a lot about Chilean street art, most recently in a photo essay by Oakland artist Obi Kaufmann (discussed in connection to his recent mural here). We stood around The Oakbook’s small gallery space, and I listened to Obi talk about the distinctions of Chilean street art: materials lending a unique aesthetic (due to the relative absence of aerosol spray paint in the country), and the culture of muralism leading to the acceptance, even support, of the community (you’re more likely to see street art on the sides of businesses and schools than abandoned warehouses). I can’t say I saw a lot of street art when I was in Santiago, nearly five years ago. Something has changed.

Judging from the picture presented by Chile Estyle, the explosion of street art in Chile has a lot to do with the country regaining confidence and reestablishing its identity. Artists in the video talk about seeing work from New York, Europe, Brazil, and taking pride in the fact that Chile can contribute works just as valuable and important. But, of course, it comes with their own distinct style, a product of their own history and culture.

This one's for you, Mom

The video discusses “Chilean graffiti identity,” informed by the country’s tradition of political muralism. Uber populist and at its core revolutionary, graffiti and street art are seen as an extension of the self-expression that acted in rebuttal to (right-wing) major media outlets—“walls are taken much like a newspaper.” The tradition has lent a culture and community far more tolerant of street art than in most places of the world; it’s seen as “a gift for the people,” rather than vandalism. And, as Chilean street art has begun to garner international attention (like in a recent exhibition at LA’s Carmichael Gallery), it’s become a source of national pride.

How different this is from the culture of street art around the world. And more than just isolated vestiges of self-expression, one can take Chilean street art as a product of the country’s past and perhaps one of best reflections of its contemporary culture.

This is what I’ve been suspecting street art could do. In moments of blinding conviction, I’ve felt that street art, in its democratic and uncommercialized glory, can capture placeness just as well as food or architecture or music or any number of things people look to when they travel. In a continual cross-pollination of artists and influences, cities wear a bit more of their souls on their walls, as though the murals and stencils and wheatpastes were images from its dreams. It’s the way a city like Tel Aviv becomes a mecca for political street art, the way the aesthetic now known as Mission School bloomed in the alleyways of the 90’s SF Mission, whispering its stories in neon—and the way the tradition of political muralism paved the way and painted the walls for a purely Chilean approach to the art form.

And I still don’t have the words for it, the right or complete words to explain it all—because of course, virtually the same things could be said about all art forms, in how they inform and are informed by place. But something in me sparks when it comes to graffiti, in the same place of my brain that travel ignites. I guess the only thing to do is keep digging, poking, on the internet and down alleyways, until I stumble upon the thing it is I’m trying to say—painted on the walls in plain sight.

Take Me Back to Bunker Hill: Finding What I Came For in Downtown LA

Published April 1, 2010 Being American , Independent , LA , Places , USA 3 Comments
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“Well,” my Dad asked, “did you find what you were looking for?”

I sat travel-dazed and dirty-socked at the dining room table. I’d fought the coming home blues all 372 miles up the 101, driven straight to my parents’ house to eat dinner, tell stories and delay actually arriving home a couple more hours. My car rested in the driveway like a tired horse, bag-laden and dirt-covered. I couldn’t remember having ever wanted to come home less.

Of course, my dad meant Los Angeles, its gritty and unglossy underside—had I found it? I’d made quite the to-do over my mission to dig in, delve beneath and uncover buried, bloody gems of LA’s uncommercializable heart—the skeletons in its closets, its alleyways, the voices that came through tattered paperbacks and the shrieking distortion of old punk LPs. Had I gotten there, found there, held a bit of there in my hands like it could be mine?

Downtown mural

I stayed mostly in Downtown, LA’s most un-LA area. Modestly tall buildings jangled with the light dancing off of cheap jewelry stores; young girls beckoned you to enter their stores, calling out the names of goods in Spanish; a legless beggar with perfectly combed hair occupied the pavement outside Clifton’s Cafeteria; Santeria markets abutted Art Deco theater marquees, sitting above boarded-up entrances and watching the street like purgatoried angels. Hipsters took morning strolls with their well-groomed dogs, past shopping carts and transient twitching, the encampments of misery that compose Skid Row. There were no Valley Girls, OC bros or Pilates-perfect MILFs. There was even a cafe that served Ritual coffee.

It’s called “Historic” Downtown, complete with markers and murals, and I crossed several groups of confused tourists, consulting street maps and looking up bewildered at the carcasses of LA history as if it say, “Huh?” You learn to take the term “history” with a grain of salt in California, but it went beyond that—this was barely even a Downtown. There were no bustling businessmen, no Banana Republics, no dudes hawking maps of celebrities’ homes on the street corner, no tourist facilities, not really any non-neighborhood locals. Working-class, non-white, unglamorous—this was Downtown LA.

I hiked over to Bunker Hill, a doomed and fruitless mission, I knew. It was once a down-and-out neighborhood that held, in the shadows of its slanted incline, flophouses and brothels, dive bars and cheap hotels, derelicts and drunkards and two of the best damn writers to come out of that cursed city. John Fante curled up in the liquor-soaked sweetness of the slum, while Charles Bukowski broke furniture and chased alcoholic insanity in its tenements. A 1950s revitalization project razed the ramshackle Victorians, paved over the shattered remains of lives and dreams and addictions, suffocating the howling ghosts neatly beneath office parks, wide streets and sterilized, sparkling sidewalks.

There was nothing to discover. I tromped up a San-Francisco-steep hill, glanced at the historical markers, cruised past the newspaper village of bare feet and cigarette butts outside the Central Library. I stood on a corner that will next week be renamed John Fante Square, and not a damn thing remained. Not a shadow, not an echo, not a ghost of a passing fit of madness. There was, to use a tired and perfect quote, no there there.

But of course, there never really had been. None of it was true, not all the way true, at least. Us writers and alcoholics are tragically skilled at romanticizing even the most sordid, harrowing of places and experiences—and in all likelihood, the actual Bunker Hill bore more resemblance to the modern-day Downtown than it did the gloriously gritty harem of passion portrayed in the novels I’ve loved. It was, most likely, a sweet little lie those boys told themselves, in their more tender of moments, when they ached for something to hold them, rock them, hum the lullaby of a childhood none of us really had. I know I’ve been guilty of rose-painting, perfuming the past, my own life, and it takes a photograph, something tangible, to jar me out of it, to remind myself how much it hurt, it bled, it puked and moaned; I saw people die, burn out, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”

So in that way, what I sought was all a mirage anyway. The narrow alleys and sagging Victorians of Bunker Hill may have been gone, but had the illusory soul of the place ever been more than that, a fevered dream? There was a current-day incarnation, just down the hill—laced with more sinister, soul-eating of drugs, for sure, with the rattle of shopping carts and broken lives—but it was probably a more accurate representation of Bunker Hill than those exalted odes to insanity, like the moment of pure genius and bliss before the trip goes back and the come-down shatters in.

But maybe it was all a mirage, Los Angeles—an oasis that keeps glimmering just a little further out in the sand. Katie told me about a girl she’d met in a penthouse one day (“typical LA story—went out for a coffee, met the Del Taco guy, went up to his apartment with his friends…”): perfectly thin and gorgeous, a 22-year-old model who’d run away from her Midwest home at 15, found herself stranded in California when the boyfriend ditched out, came to LA, rose in the ranks and behind the flashing of cameras, sat now on a leather sofa doing rails of cocaine off a glass coffee table. “She was the total LA person—came from somewhere else, chasing this glamourous illusion, the LA dream. She knew it was a dream, she was totally aware of it, but still too addicted to the dream to disconnect.”

Here’s what I learned: LA is a place for seekers. It seems it always has been, at least for the last 100 years or so. The City of Angeles, of a fleeting fulfillment you can almost, but never quite, grasp. There’s an LA dream, that’s not too unlike the American dream, that this too can be yours, that you too can find it, have it, hold it. It’s a flickering projection of images, like on the backs of eyelids or clean white screens, that’s so close to being real you could almost weep, almost believe it.

So did I find what I was looking for? Yes and no. It may have all been a dream to begin with, like the utopias of the almost-cults I visited. It had been bulldozed and redesigned with crisp corners and clean towers; it was living on in the ragged throats and stained clothes of Skid Row. It was a memory so old you don’t know whether it was a dream or not; it was a love song for the one you never really, but almost, had.

Lauren Quinn is a writer and traveler currently living in Hanoi. Lonely Girl Travels was a blog of her sola travels and expat living from 2009 to 2012. She resides elsewhere on the internet now.

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