by John Bocskay

 

Back home in Pusan with my head full of America. I spent a month there, mostly trying to run and eat at the same time, catching up on family and old friends. Trying to get reacquainted with my mad country.

Every time I go back to America, it seems more and more like a foreign country to me. Harder than ever to make sense of the place and its people. I like going back. Despite the madness, it remains home in some way, though not in the way which makes me feel like kicking off my shoes and settling down to a long something-or-other.

What follows may be very impressionistic, which seems to be the best I can do when talking about America. Maybe the Impressionists were right--maybe it's the best you can do when talking about anything. Witness the endless debates whenever we try to nail things down and make words stand still. Impressions are inherently subjective, but they flirt with the truth. Analysis tries to marry it and chain it to a stove.

I love going anywhere; it makes me an amateur anthropologist all over again. I spent some time in LA last month. I had never been there, but how many times have I been transported there in movies, images, songs and stories? Perhaps more than any other city, it's impossible to go to LA with a blank slate. 

I expected there to be a lot of traffic in LA. There was, although this cliché only hints at the truth--that Los Angeles is actually a city populated by automobiles. There are people there of course, but their presence is apparently required only to move the cars around. I submit as evidence: many people drive simply to drive, and the people who do set out to go "somewhere" don't expect to get there anytime soon. Some people of course bristle at this task, sometimes shooting each other over what is really a beef between two automobiles.

Other people appear to have hit upon an admirable solution to the problem of living to serve their cars--they simply live in them. Witness them eating, shaving, talking on telephones or to themselves when necessary. It's a mystery to me why they don't bulldoze the houses already and pave the vacated lots.

Los Angeles is however blessed with abundant natural beauty because it has to be or nobody would ever dream of living there. Beaches that stretch for miles, rugged mountains and the Mojave desert as a backyard. You remember the city lies in a desert after the sun goes down and you shiver on the same beach that only an hour ago turned your skin a painful red.

Good times on Venice beach with poets, freaks, and myself. There are two types of people, or three, or five million in Los Angeles--the detached and dream-like, those who want to live dreams and those who actually are. 
 

So many dream yachts on Santa Monica bay for the fireworks. Coming through the harbor on a big yacht and everybody looks at you, wanting so badly to recognize a face. Is that, is that, is it?…no, and they go back to whatever they were doing.

And the small rubber rafts on the harbor at night, every idiot and his brother out in their boats for the Fourth of July. A night of drunkenness and collisions--and still the rubber rafts in the thick of the choked harbor, some with flashlights or trimmed with neon string, others dark and their brave/foolish captains whooping and hollering Happy Birthday America.

The fireworks a party, a display of force. The Chinese invented gunpowder and its twin uses, war and celebration. America has taken both and pushed them to the extreme. Watch the show, the stunning control of so many bombs, the gods of thunder. Beautiful bombs, the high art of blowing things up. Explosion as expression. Rings and planets and hearts in fire above Santa Monica Bay.

Hanging with Greg Esai on the Venice boardwalk. If he had even a mote of ambition you would already know his name. But he is happy to sit in the sun with his guitar-strung-like-a-dulcimer, drinking beer out of innocent-looking pink plastic cups like little girls take to school in their lunchboxes. Music and stories and comfortable silence.

Greg: I fell in love with a girl and almost married her. She was part Irish, part French and part Cherokee. Very beautiful and very bright. She worked for an investment bank in Brentwood on Wilshire Boulevard. She was a skip tracer…you know what that is?

Me: No.

Greg: A skip tracer tracks down people who skip out on loans. People who skip out on loans don't want to be found, right? So she would have to lie to find them. She got really good at it. Now, when you're paid to lie like that, it's hard to keep it from spilling over into the rest of your life…Basically, she devastated me.

American woman, mama let me be. I don't know how to talk to LA woman. Or I do but I don't want to? The LA pick-up line, or actually, the deal-closer: "Well, I guess I'll just go home now and chill in the hot tub…(significant pause)."

The people who became Californians pushed West and only stopped where they did because they ran into an ocean. They pushed West because they had been East and they didn't want to do it like that anymore. Now they build a New World as a modus operandi; this mission is in fact California's reason for being. It is for this reason that Californians are the most American of Americans; they have taken the phrase "New World" far more literally than anyone else.

California's main imports are fantasy and ambition, and it exports dreams to the world. They dream for all of us, like it or not, which often means letting us into their nightmares too. Moments of beauty and flashes of brilliance--and then here it is dark and ugly. Metropolis as experiment. They aimed, if nothing else, to create something new. They have succeeded in that.

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