Venice Sunday


By John Davis

On a crisp autumn Sunday I decided to escape from my dogs, at least for a while. Leaving them at home I began a short walk about to the beach. First I stopped at Café Collage to snag a cup of Earl Grey tea that led to yet another.


Noting that the morning newspaper had already been picked apart and only sorry old weeklies like the Arrrrrgonaut were left, I resigned myself to sitting at a table on the Main Street sidewalk to enjoy some afternoon sun and caffeine.

On the way to this historic part of Venice, adorned with old buildings and carved faces on the colonnades I noticed a happy family cruising by in a turquoise 1960 Impala convertible. It was hard to tell it was a family at first but I finally noticed three very small heads popping up from the seats to take in the sights.

In that frame of mind I sat on the sidewalk in the new green plastic seats and much to my delight I found they were flexible enough to lean back in while I used another to kick up the old feet theater style.

And it really began to seem more like a good movie than reality. First a snow white 1970 Mustang Mach 1 pulled up to the light with its mighty V8 rumbling. As it pulled away I thought about the Mustangs I had owned and visualized myself dropping the floor shifter into first and heading out to the mountains for a Sunday drive. But then I was pulled back into reality by a red Porsche Carrera that met my line of site. Then a cobalt blue 70 Chevelle rumbled by.

My eyes then wandered up to the second floor of one of the nineteen-twenty buildings across the Street. All were empty except one. An artist thoughtfully painted something hidden by the window frame. I watched her brushstrokes as she moved the sculpture of a persons head into view. A dab here and there, she patiently gave long thoughtful pause between every new application from her palate of colors.

A guy who appeared to be in his late 60s sat next to me, talking on a cell phone. He was dressed in clean outdoorsman clothing and work boots. Next to him was placed a bundle that seemed to hold everything he owned in life. This guy tempted me. I had not played chess in years and here on the table next to him was a homemade board concocted of cardboard and magic marker with a jumble of disorderly pieces in the center. Then he laid his head in his hands and slept in the warmth of the sun.

A young couple walked out of the Gotta Have It clothing store and faced me with an October Beachhead looking at pictures of Burning Man. Both dressed in black, they turned while she leaned on the column, a carved smiling female face above her. What struck me was their seasonal attire. On her black handbag was a big white skull. On the back of his black tee shirt was a white human ribcage. Great, at least some people were respecting Halloween.

Looking across the street I notice the person who I saw feeding ducks at night at the parking lot on the Grand Canal when I walked my dogs. He would pull up in a nice old green BMW with duck feed and the flock would gather. What a nice person. And how cool to see people you recognize.

Before I left for the Beach the old guy tempted me yet again. Slowly, in the clean sea breeze he smoothly slid the chess pieces into place on the hand drawn board while substituting two missing pawns with black checker pieces. This was fine with me, it was more formal than beer caps. He must have been a wizard. Or perhaps a master of martial arts disguising himself and looking for deciples. I then escaped his intellectual magnetism, which was clearly more powerful than it first appeared, assisted by the power of a double dose of stiff black steaming hot tea.

So from one magic place to another I did trek. Standing at the crosswalk of Windward and Main I peered across to see a beautiful Asian lady on a bike with bare feet and toenails painted pink. In a flash we passed on the street. Peering down the hallway of arches on the sidewalk, descending in size due to distance, a framed shimmering sea appeared like a thumbnail sketch with a 28ft sailboat lumbering to the south at a brisk clip.

Breaking out into the sun near the boardwalk I noticed that what had only been one performer at the entrance had now became three. The first of these guys really had balls. I mean that. In one of his acts he holds two orbs that he rolls up and down his arms and around his neck. This dude only wears a tight black swimming suit showing his muscular body, even on cold days. He truly has balls of steel, really that is what his performance balls are made of. In another act a man stands on a stepladder, balancing a crooked stick on his head while holding two real looking rubber Cobras in each hand. But it wasnt long before another performer was edging in on this gig. Wearing a suit and hat, this mime is spray painted gold seeming more like a robot than a man. If that were not enough, recently another sculpted black guy oiled up to accentuate his muscularity partially covers himself in bright white feathers and wears angel wings. He too is a mime.
That while several different reggae songs meshed with the voices of hundreds of voices of different lands.
Crossing the Boardwalk on the way to the sea a flow of creativity from artists of all colors looked more like a masterful watercolor than movement. Then as I was approaching the West, one adventurous mountain bike girl rolled down the hill the “V” sculptures sits upon.

From that viewpoint it was apparent sailboats were racing. Besides the Regatta running West to circle a buoy and return to Marina del Rey, lots of smaller sailboats cruised around the buoy West of the Santa Monica Pier to visit the many seals that rest on them. The bay was vast and crowned by the azure blue Santa Monica Mountains and the steep cliffs of the Palos Verdes peninsula.

A local surfing contest that had occurred for years was housed under a couple of blue canopies while the contestants ripped on the three to four foot waves south of the breakwater. The County tried to stop them this year but the surfers stood up and the contest went on anyway.

Looking back east you could see the skateboarders defying gravity and flipping their boards around like martial arts weapons, clacking and grinding. This opposed to the grace and agility of the skating dancers one level below. Spinning, grooving, and moving around to the giant stereo on wheels, this troupe was more entertaining than the Olympics. They owned the rhythm, or at least shared it with the drum circle whose sounds drifted south on the wind.

Backtracking home where I would surely be tried and found guilty by my dogs of walking without them, I cruised past the bike rental place and two old guys that sit on their custom Harleys every weekend. They dress like Hells Angels, have ZZ Top Beards, and potbellies but I think they are really retired stockbrokers. But they fit into place with the Old Town Bar, its black and white tiled floors smoothed from the feet of decades of happy beer drinkers.

Rising well over eight thousand feet the San Gabriel range of mountains stood tall over downtown Los Angels with billowing clouds towering above. That view east down Windward Avenue is mirrored as a mural on the side of the Saint Marks Club.

With my perception now dulled by the lack of caffeine it was time to walk back into media saturation and witness the struggle for the Presidency. Thank God for Mother, Apple Pie, and Venice Beach.

Posted: Mon - November 1, 2004 at 04:31 PM          

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