An Immoveable Feast
By John
O’Kane
It’s Sunday
in Venice, California. The South Beach Café mid-morning. I catch a glimpse
of faces familiar but distorted through the tobacco haze, some mumbling their
first greetings on what promises to be another day in paradise at land's edge.
Leon’s en-tranced by the
breakfast special, as if the random meeting of cajun fries, sourdough muffins
and splats of sunnyside-up give him the bare outlines of the Buddha, the angles
joined in a sublime cessation of
self-versus-things…
Chloe
gives us a freeze frame of tie-dyed ecstasy as she blows by on her skateboard,
doing a quick boomerang. She enters the field of trance for a brief moment
before cracking the
Buddha…
Sabine is
distracted by Chloe's entrance but quickly turns to her right as George ambles
toward her table. They met on the Boardwalk in the heat of the first big Vietnam
War protest, marrying in the nude at daybreak weeks later on the pier, parenting
their share of memories now dispersed in the shadows of corporate
America…
As they
fantasize renewing vows, Zack breaks the plane. He cycles the tables flagging a
dogeared, coffee-splattered badge of
Howl,
eyeballing Sabine's yellow ribbon. He's euphoric about reading his new work at
the Bistro, his destination a few doors down. He sits briefly at Van's table,
still edgy from the yellow glow, then jerks out onto the Boardwalk, shadowing us
with celestial advice while rushing to take in the sun's full
stream…
Van tunes his
guitar with nicotine nerves, gulping his imported double-latte for fuel as a few
early-arriving tourists carefully tiptoe between tables protecting their
croissants. He claims to be the missing Door, performing occasionally with the
early group in the ramshackle hideaways around Westminster Ave. He's been
collecting royalties on his 15 minutes of fame, jamming at the Town House and
other revival roosts, riffing about all those
chicks…
One sits along
the north side of the café in the shadows glued to the overheated
conversation at the tarot table across the Boardwalk. Marci whetted her appetite
for the collective in one of Venice's first biker gangs during the 60s, finding
her niche in various communes over the next decade or so before joining a high
desert exurb of bibles and gun-racks virtually gutted in the fires of 1999.
She's been living with a sister in town and recently started frequenting the
hare krishna center over on Rose
Ave…
She looks up as Alex
brushes her table, dropping leaflets about some meeting next week at a motel
near Lincoln and Navy, raving about Malatesta and joining the Black Bloc at next
month’s anti-war demo in Hollywood. Leon stirs from his adjacent table, as
if insulted, spraying the source with a rap of caffeine vapor and coffee-grounds
projectiles left from the final gulp of his late morning upper, leaving him
voided of words. Alex returns a blank stare and jerks left to exit as he hands a
leaflet to Malcolm, just piercing the café's southern edge with his new
teen trophy…
Malcolm
spies the verbal drift thumbs down, pulling his package away from the eruption.
Teethed on Alan Watts in the memory gaps between 50s and 60s, he mastered the
mute of past and future, finding the whole in strokes of orgiastic holiness.
When the buttons, herb, capsules, crystals or any other substances he could
score no longer swelled his visions in the 80s, he exchanged them to stake the
future, making peace with the NOW by getting high on property inflation.
He bolts as Sarah arrives. A
survivor of the mid-60s battles to free Venice from all sorts of institutional
harassment, she begins prepping her day's shoot to document the homeless, some
still stirring in their roosts along the wall abutting the Boardwalk's western
edge where they've staked claim to one of this continent's last real plots of
the American Dream…
The
South Beach Café sits on the south side of Rose Ave and the Boardwalk at
the northern edge of town, a few short blocks from the Santa Monica border and
endless development up the coast. To the south swells the bazaar of offerings to
tourists and beachgoers, the tattoo parlors, pizza slice vendors, tarot palmers,
incense innovators, bodybuilders, t-shirt stands, jugglers, mystical healers and
logo-hawkers of every stripe. It stretches all the way to the Washington Blvd.
boundary with Marina del Rey. This line is also an extension of the one pier
surviving all the changes since founder Abbot Kinney’s fantasies about
Venice Italy were consummated in 1905.
To the east for a block,
sometimes two or more, are idyllic walkway streets running almost seamlessly
south to the Circle, the town center and mouth of the original city, forming a
solid barrier from there to the southern border. The area just east of this
southern bloc of walkways is where the few remaining canals languish. And to the
west a wavy sheen of reflective surfaces, green, gray, blue, golden brown,
turquoise, peach, whatever the hue of daylight parsed through wind and clouds.
The café repels post-card
fables. When the sages and chroniclers of the future look back at this moment
from their tracks toward infinity they’ll likely miss it. The South Beach
will never compete with Abbot’s Adriatic adornments, the palatial
Doges-replicas, coffee-table snapshots of the umbrella-caped and sun-weary
leisure set from the pre-Depression years, or the original canal city’s
aria-singing gondoliers. And certainly not the goatees and sandals raving and
jutting Bird’s discords in and around all those famed 50s cafes like the
Venice West.
It’s this
café that begs immediate comparison to the South Beach. They’re even
located on the same square block. The Venice West Café, established in the
late 50s at 7 Dudley Ave, was the original Beat coffeehouse that drew folks from
many places and persuasions to experiment with alternative values and
lifestyles. It was the first in a network of hotspots for poetry readings and
good talk, eventually mushrooming into a manifesto-friendly cauldron as the
political 60s arrived. They haven’t fared well over the years, however,
constantly threatened with closure from various citizens concerned that the
activity would draw too many unmentionables. Not to mention the LAPD. John Haag,
proprietor of the Venice West Café from the early 60s until its demise in
1966, quipped recently that officers started spending so much time in and around
the Café during these years that it was becoming an unofficial precinct.
The My Lai of closures was the
Gas House at Market and the Boardwalk, dozed in October 1962 after only a few
years in business. Actually it was overdozed in a fit of revenge by community
vigilant, destroyed ahead of schedule and while still occupied by squatting
bohos, an October revolutionary surprise indeed that seemed intent on hollowing
out the spiritual foundations of this site. Carol Fondiller, resident since 1958
and current member of the
Beachhead,
Venice’s alternative monthly paper, bore witness to this
event.
The most recent major
atrocity was the Lafayette Café at Westminster and the Boardwalk, a beacon
for long-time residents in their prime of belief the community might live on in
some other way. But it also went before its time, becoming a food court in the
mid-80s, converted with a whimpering pen stroke like many others since. No bang
necessary in this new world order.
What perhaps irks folks so
about these cafes is their open invite to all who don’t want to spend,
only talk and consort with known cadres. And this can only lead to bad things.
As security forces lying in wait at all the global demos against unfree trade
know so well, one of the sure ways to victory is to prevent protestors from
amassing together in the first place, refuse them the chance to mingle and share
experiences. Once allowed, a power greater than the sum of the individual bodies
might emerge. The best course of action is to keep folks behind closed doors in
the first place, make sure the open conversational range never exists.
It’s all about fences
and barriers, learning to feel free in secluding yourself from the fray. Two of
the more striking changes in Venice are the appearance of more and more fences
around properties, and the arrival of cafes of smiling uniforms hawking logoed
tee-shirts and mugs to market segments dripping with exclusive degrees of
conversation and cash. They somehow boost each other. As more and more arrivals
perform plastic surgery on their neighborhoods and shoo street life off to
others, space shrinks for renewing public creativity. It’s being filled
with dog walks profuse with the smell of sea-breeze doo-doo and the chatter of
networking from many wired-up oblivious on their jogs.
And so free spirits, if they
can even afford to remain here, are increasingly without means to speak and act.
They pop up at the South Beach and other similar places like landless peasants
seeking their stake in a vanishing
country.
The South Beach is not
pretty and it caters to residents few want to face these days. They span the
spectrum from the temporary homeless and marginally housed and others so bent on
survival they can barely focus the facades, to those doing just fine who
experience fits of clarity about our new world order. Many of these even have
the best credentials.
Like
Gerry Fialka. He runs the 7 Dudley Cinema at Sponto Gallery, site of the former
Venice West Café, a venue for experimental media and especially the Venice
historical links to it. A creatively organic intellectual in the true sense of
the phrase, he’s a virtual encyclopedia of information about McLuhan,
avantgarde art and anarchist politics, the kind Venice is known for that seeds
community empowerment at the expense of central authority. He attracts the
constituency of actors in art and politics that give this city its persistent
vitality and brings many to the café on his coattails, those who may not
know which party is in power, or even who Ernest Hemingway is, but when the
crosswinds are right can spout a reasonable facsimile in the finest tongues.
This is important because
there are few purebred apostles of any alternative creed that hang here.
They’re mostly mixed-blood members of shifting groups with visions that
might overlap it on any given Sunday. They’re joined by a smattering of
purists, drop-ins for the most part who unfortunately don’t make this
scene too often, the famed few or a somewhat larger number who relish their
lives underground. They don’t add much to the beauty of the place either,
at least from the vantage of outside observers.
This mix of amateurs and
professionals gives the café its special quality that won’t likely be
duplicated in the foreseeable future. Even the other cafes in the area with
similar clientele, the Café Collage near the Circle, Groundworks on Rose
and 7th, or Abbot’s Habit at California Ave and Abbot Kinney Blvd., lack
the same cross-over pizzazz. The name itself pitches bohemian karma and invites
instant comparisons to San Francisco’s North Beach.
The sandwich of customers on
this day is fairly typical. All have some investment in either the actual legacy
of alternative Venice, or its potent idea. Like so many workers in our
post-industrial world they’re mostly part-timers, lacking the ability and
means to be full-fledged partisans. So it’s not by choice. Though being
forced to manage in the margins with minimal resources controlled by others has
blurred choices and made fits of nostalgia routine.
But the café’s days
are likely numbered since it depends on these residents, and fates both natural
and artificial are in the process of disappearing them. Not a pretty sight to
ponder. It continues to offer a sort of sanctuary to them, a space to form bonds
the surrounding circus dissolves. But for how much longer?
If you suspect your story is
not likely to make it onto a postcard that finds its way into all the right
places down through the ages, then why not print up your own? When I dropped in
for breakfast last week, right next to the free papers on the counter were
stacks of postcards for posterity. Mementos for satisfied customers to pass
around when they get back to Butte. They might even end up in a pyramid that
mushrooms across the land and captures the souls of the next great generation of
dropouts lying in wait for the right moment. And these cards are done up real
professional by a New York company to boot, max custom media.
I asked the grandfatherly
founder of this family-owned concern, Papa Joe, why he went to all the bother.
He just shrugged:
“We
have to keep up…the times are always changin…if we don’t then
we’ll
be…”
“…keep
up with what?”
Just then
someone shrieked by on skates. It was so shrill that Ralphy, whom you could
virtually hot-foot any ole time without ruffling his grin, grabbed his ears and
started to dance around us in a figure-eight and shield us from intrusion.
Reading between the lines of
Papa Joe’s elliptical remarks, and digesting morsels of gossip at
breakfast, it seems business has fallen off pretty steeply since 9/11. Perhaps
George Bush’s advice to get spending and exorcise our demons hasn’t
made it to one of the states that nearly exorcised him. Many up-and-comers do
think it smells too bad. And more and more down-and-outers claim the espresso
steam, what little of it there is to date, makes them nervous. More than ample
incentive for Papa Joe to get market savvy. He of all folks appears to know that
when the dollar-push comes to shove we find out who owns the voting franchise:
those latted with dispersible bucks! But he must wonder if going after this
power bloc won’t lead to what appears inevitable these days, the arrival
of another franchise to fill in the cluster.
The postcard might solve this
dilemma. It images a devoted downgrade to habitats Starbucks wantonly violates.
It shows the owner reclining on a see-through bubble lounger in the middle of
the café. And that’s it! None of the folks who frequent the
establishment, or even those whom you would think he wants to attract, the new
market segments, if indeed the times have changed. No attempt to take advantage
of the pool of commercials actors making the Abbot Kinney Blvd. scene and spruce
up the story. He wouldn’t even have to sell out.
Yet how could this café
be espressoed to code and
stay loyal to those who got him here?
A perusal of the postcard prompts a possible answer. The background is
wall-to-wall soft-drink cases that visualize one of the most significant
challenges facing our nation today: Coke or Pepsi? Even the few bottles of water
they contain are pronounceable. The menu does include “French
Burgers” and “Italian Coffee,” a few sauced-up-croissanted
patty melts and a choice of either expresso or café au lait to relieve the
monotony of the endless dripping gallons of brown liquid. No serial of caffeine
delights!
It’s hard to
imagine these familiar staples getting an erotic makeover in the minds of
subliminal seducers. In fact as the picture makes very clear, the café has
not yet converted to plastic sodas like the convenience marts. It still sells
the cheaper canned variety, perhaps trying to keep the American penchant for
bargains alive, or refusing to give in to the new practice of patriotic
inflation. Those plastic sodas are double the price but deliver barely more
juice. Of course plastic is an oil
byproduct!
Marvelous idea, a
postcard that refuses to inflate the surrounding world to lure customers into
the what-you-see-is-what-you-get nature of this one. Papa Joe’s reclining
pose on the bubble-lounger suggests someone deep in thought and oblivious to the
camera. He probably knows that once you make eye contact with it all bets are
off. The eyes can be windows to the soul but the lens only muddles up the look
and sends us soulful copy instead? This image will not attract folks who thrive
on glitzy appearances.
He
could be “The Thinker,” that outdoor sculpture of Balzac smack in
the middle of the left bank made popular flesh here on the western bank of
civilization. A kind of 21st century market correction. Things were way too
serious anyway back when those Parisian artists and intellectuals were getting
professional by hopping from café to café. Did Hem catch a strain of
self-abuse he could never shirk from trying to seed his rep among equals, and
just take the big sleep in Ketchum? His sober takes actually seeped into the
genes. In the 90s, just up the beach in Santa Monica, his granddaughter
succumbed. It can’t happen here. It’s all carefree and fun. Relax
and let the good times roll and your head-crises will be as alien as
Kant’s language.
On the
left bank Alice B. Toklas was just the other half of an item, her contributions
overshadowed by Gertrude Stein’s creative notoriety. On our bank she got
full-billing in one of the most notorious movies ever made in Venice: “I
Love You, Alice B. Toklas,” the 1968 pop-surreal satire of the
hip-versus-square worlds with Peter Sellers. A few of the scenes were actually
filmed near the café. Art for those whose ironic bent boomerangs back to
the tell-it-like-it-is mode.
So what you see in this
postcard is likely what you’ll get. The messages are clear. We don’t
want lap-top leerers and other tourists of the trade who come with the slick
images. We don’t want to gentrify. We would love to have some of that cash
the up-and-comers appear to be passing around. We’re after all good
Americans in search of a buck. We admit that when you get the ad bug
you’re usually a couple phone calls away from the exterminator (actually,
they’ve recently had their share of service interruptions!). But
we’d prefer the carriers convert to the family first and then become legit
slummers. Come on back all you patriots who’ve faded into the new world
order. Lets stay the course together
for…
Hopefully a few more
years. Yet Papa Joe has to feel the increasingly-intense wrecking-ball vibes
throughout the community he passionately supports. And he’s certainly no
slouch when it comes to Venice’s history. There’s an enlarged
panoramic photo from 1926 on the door of this very space. We see the Lick Pier
and the Boardwalk’s wealth of architectural gems in the background, with a
dense mass of overdressed pleasure-seekers crouched under hats and umbrellas in
the foreground marked by the Rose Ave street sign. A clever reminder about the
pretty past that might snag wayward tourists, but also mental nourishment for
those who refuse to slip into a timeless amusement vacuum. If Starbucks moves
in, will they add snips of the vintage South Beach to their postcard rack?
…The weekend invaders
begin swarming past the South Beach as most locals slip away into another
Sunday's business. Visitors from the valleys, inland empires and inner cities
all over the metroplex are herded together with vacationers from nearly
everywhere else. Most plug into the reverie of distraction along the continent's
last walkway, bemused and sated consumers trolling for kicks, barely noticing
the pockets of street theater or art works garnishing the Boardwalk's west side.
The rest give it their best gloss.
All are equal under the
wafting smell of pizza slices, body odor and burning incense, alloy of
boom-boxed demos and head-pounding muzak, glut of alluring sights contorted by
splashes of mid-day sun, and the ecstasy of knowing they’re being seen
with others like themselves. They drool the spread of self-satisfied pleasure,
as clear and confident that’s all there is as the digitized logos
embroidering them.
Tanned
fanny-pack #1 erupts from the crowd fixed on the table vacated next to Leon.
Before sitting down she pulls out a handy-wipe from one of her bags and gives
the furniture a thorough fumigation, while fanny-pack #2 in tow snakes through
the congesting customers, taking a seat only after scoping the periphery. As #1
juts up to go order, the edge of her pack catches Leon's styrofoam cup, sending
the few ounces of brown liquid onto the pisces predictions he’d been
savoring. The expected apology not forthcoming he turns to #2 as #1 makes a
bee-line toward the counter. #2, beside himself, grunts: "Go get a job!" Leon
sheepishly gets up to leave, knocking over their Evian bottle. He speeds up his
exit-pace to avoid further conflict.
Sabine, ready to exit the
gathering mayhem, joins the Peace and Freedom Party-sponsored anti-war march
flowing along the boardwalk from Ozone. This is provoking a refrain of putdowns
from many merchants along the west side, that "the war's over, idiots. Go home!"
As the paraders begin tossing back the taunts, the conflict Leon left behind
shows signs of spreading like wildfire into some serious political underbrush. I
leave just in time to miss the volley of pizza slice parts, making my way to the
Cadillac Hotel a half-block south where a woman with a perfect accent asks:
"Excuse me love. Could you
direct me to the nearest Starbucks?"
Posted: Fri - December
1, 2006 at 08:47 PM