LA’S MALAISE- HEAT, INDECISION, AND THE SUMMER SUBLET FROM HELL (part 1)

Okay, so it’s not exactly fear and loathing in Las Vegas, but you get what you pay for, hopefully. Or at least that’s what I thought when I decided to pursue a summer sublease in the general environs of Hollywood and Thai Town, ‘Hollywood adjacent’ in renters’ jargon. Hotels here won’t let you stay longer than 28 days for reasons unstated, and even those weekly rates go up precipitously come June (not to mention the stigma of being ‘transient’). A micro-wave oven and a mini-fridge does not a kitchen make, either, almost but not quite. Furnished apartments are almost unheard of, witness box springs on the sidewalk the first of every month, and likely not cheap. Ditto for less-than-one-year leases, almost unheard of. Buying a house in LA is not for the faint of heart either, a cool half million just to get started, and don’t forget the security system. They say prices are down 30% from last year, but fail to mention that those prices are still 70% over 2000. Do the math. So a ‘summer sublet’ seemed like an inspired idea for anyone who knows how to log on. The print press ain’t got jack. It’s time to look to good ol’ Craig’s List, right? Even Internet bozos should be able to handle a simple sublet, right? That’s a so-called ‘no-brainer,’ isn’t it? It seems others have the same idea, so the competition is fierce, even though there are probably two hundred new listings a day for ‘greater LA’ (don’t laugh), and those list for a week, so some thousand listings at any given time. Those aren’t all around Hollywood of course and many are well over a thousand a month. They can get weird, too, renting out the master bedroom while major tenant sleeps on the living room couch, and so on. Such is the dream factory. Rooms for rent in a shared house are ubiquitous, which is good if you got no credit, but we didn’t want that. Still I responded to half a dozen before I even got a call-back; small units may not want couples.

Finally I got a response and things seemed amenable to both parties, an inexpensive sublet through the busy summer months right off the red line metro train in Hollywood. I might have known something was flakey when she wanted to meet first to make sure we were ‘cool enough’ to hang out with her neighbors, but I didn’t. Fortunately we passed or my self-esteem would have reached unfathomable lows. So we signed a little pro-forma lease, I giving her a lump-sum deposit and monthly rent including utilities, and she’ll handle the actual bills. That sounds simple enough, right? What could be easier? There’s only one problem, one at a time, that is. She mentioned nothing of this arrangement to the landlord or apartment manager. Now I haven’t rented a crib in the US for some twenty years, since before the days when you had to pay to apply for such, but even I kinda’ knew that subletting wasn’t OK unless you OK’d it first. But even then you might slide through like somebody’s big brother AS LONG AS YOU PAY THE F*&^%$# RENT ON TIME! Well of course anybody would go that extra mile for their guest sub-lessee wouldn’t they? Naah…

First I knew there was something wrong was the evening of the third day of this month when the apartment manager stopped me as I returned in the evening and asked who the Hell I was. I explained to no good effect. Then the apartment owner (yes, OWNER, he of some two thousand rooms) wakes me up the next day at 6am to tell me I’m out of line and out of time, get on the lease or get out. Well, this will blow over quickly as soon as the rent gets paid, right? No way. He wakes me up the next day, too, threatening to change the locks before another day passes. After a little flurry of stop-payments on my part and late fees on the original lessee’s part, I finally ended the little mini-crisis by taking over the lease myself, agreeing that we could do the same thing in reverse again in August per our original agreement. Fortunately the apartment’s original renter was actually still in the area, at Mommy Dearest’s house in the valley, her only problem one of cash flow, or we’d’ve really been screwed. But anyway, problem’s over, right? For that to happen the check would have had to ACTUALLY CLEAR, THOUGH, WOULDN’T IT?! Unfortunately my replacement check to her HAD cleared (after an earlier stop payment), so my only collateral was her furniture which I’m currently using. At that point I was certain she had cleverly and sneakily manufactured the whole scenario as a way to rid herself of apartment and furnishings at maximum benefit to herself. I was actually surprised when she coughed up a money order (with penalty) to clear the little rent crisis and I realized she wasn’t a sneak, just a flake. But at least all’s well with the place now, right? All WAS well until I got the ‘final notice’ in the mail yesterday to pay LADWP ASAP or face shut-off of power and water, this bill going back three months. Fortunately in a flash of insight I had insisted on opening the bills myself and paying them or I’d’ve never known till the lights went out. It’s just another day in Paradise.

So the temps here hit three digits Fahrenheit for the fifth day running in this heat wave from Hell. It’s enough to make you miss Celsius. Forty just doesn’t sound so bad. Still life goes on and I’m still a transient, a nomad, and an ex-pat in Thai Town, looking for a job, looking for a reason for the season, albeit with my name on an apartment lease and a marriage license, still far from God, still close to Mexico. But I can’t go. I have to baby sit my wife, she of little English lingo and my name on her visa, which just passed the initial three months entry. I sent in the ‘green card’ papers, now a thousand bucks a pop, but at lest a three-in-one pop, with concurrent applications for right-to-work and ‘advance parole’ to leave the country with proper permission. The work permit will be nice since she’s been working without it for two months. Maybe the ‘advance parole’ will be multiple entry so we can go to TJ some Sunday and fill up the tank with gas. Just kidding, as I don’t have a car, not here at least. No, I’m still stuck until I can drop her off in Thailand for a spell and recuperate with a trip to Ethiopia. It’s not fair here. If we have a fight I still have to baby sit her. I can’t just stomp off saying, “see you later,” then resume the conversation in bed, older but wiser. I have to be responsible even when I’m pissed off. That, my friends, is simply not fair. At least she’s on her best behavior her, right? Yeah, right. And when we are getting along swimmingly, if I tell her I love her, she’ll ask me for a diamond ring, the silly Thai girl. I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t. At least she’s paying her half of the bills, the same gal who once had illusions of being housewife-for-life. And I waste time worrying about what to do with this silly blog, while NPR tells the good news about a slackening in the ‘rate of increase’ of oil prices. Thank God for small miracles.

NOMAD BY TRADE

Transient! The word rolls off downward-curled lips in a sneer usually reserved for such lower-castes as prostitutes, shit sweepers, backpackers, and attorneys. Some people seem to think that to live a mobile lifestyle is to be a shiftless lazy no-good bum. Maybe they’re right. Certainly the pan-handlers on the street don’t advance the cause. I’m referring to the people that you tend to smell first, like it or not, before you even realize that what they’re selling is guilt. Thank God for the sense of smell. Bio-molecular scuttlebutt is that half our genes are devoted to it, apparently to know what’s good to eat. It was probably more important in the old days when such things were not written down in cookbooks and therefore much more crucial for survival. Now it tends to have a more negative connotation, i.e. if ‘it smells,’ then it smells bad, at least in most languages, though not Thai. Thai has separate distinct verbs for ‘to smell good,’ ‘to smell bad,’ to simply have a smell at all, and of course the act of sniffing itself. The same verb for ‘to smell good’ also doubles for the act of pressing cheeks with your lover, which in Thailand takes on special importance, judging from the impression Tang’s bony skull leaves in the side of my face every morning. Thais are certainly the most olfactory people I’ve ever seen, addicted as they are to those stupid inhalants which occupy the remote corners of the shopping aisles in most countries, but pay big ad bucks in Thailand, along with multiple products to lighten female skin in six weeks. Where would we be without that? We might be fooled into thinking our spouses live healthy outdoor lifestyles, like all the Western women using products to darken their skin. Nevertheless Tang sniffed me up long before she ever kissed me, so I guess I passed the smell test. Don’t try that with the junkies in Vancouver’s Gas Town.

I can remember when there were still real hoboes, long before beatniks, hippies, or hitchhikers without a cause, hoboes who grew up with the railroad, like Chinese using it as a rite of passage into the country, getting a foot in the door and a leg up the ladder long after anyone worried about Chinese junks landing on the shores and long before anyone worried about Chinese junk landing in the stores. I saw them as a child of the 60’s wandering up the hill below my grandparents’ house in Fort Worth, but I’ve never seen them since. I guess they’ve been supplanted by ‘the homeless’ as the romance of the rails fades. You don’t see many hitch-hikers any more either, but you see plenty of homeless, and the romance is long gone. They’ve moved downtown, too, no longer relegated to the trackside or ‘under the bridge.’ I guess hitchhikers were the cultural link between the two, as I can remember some from my 70’s adventures who had actually ridden rails, though I never really did myself, nothing more than jumping on then jumping off just to prove I could. Though that was probably the heyday of mobile society, there were quickly signs that the bloom was off the rose as those same people frequently succumbed to alcohol and drug excess, replacing TV with cheap thrills at a fairly poor exchange rate I’d say. I know my own wake-up call came when I saw people drinking Sterno ‘canned heat’ to get a buzz rather than buy a six-pack of beer. For those of you who don’t know, Sterno was the jellied alcohol in a can that you simply opened and lit a match to for heat in your little portable stove. It’s worth mentioning but little compensation that the beer then wasn’t much good, either, long before micro-brews and their pubs. In those days I’d drive back from the West to Mississippi with a trunk full of Coors for the Homies, a beer that I would generously compare to piss now.

But I didn’t freak out and go sell real estate or anything. I just decided there must be some way to travel and make money, too. They said it couldn’t be done, and they were right. It can’t… any more. It’s funny that I made my living most of my life doing something that hadn’t been done before and probably won’t be done again on any large scale, dealing folk art and ethnic handicrafts. The process of tourism promoting handicrafts promoting cottage industry promoting import/exports has pretty much run its course and left native cultures more or less where they started, usually with improved local economies. That’s all they wanted after all. It’s the northern Europeans and their cousins who have the wanderlust. It’s in our Indo-Aryan speaking blood. We stayed out there on the steppes long after our southern cousins started hanging out with the Semites down on Club Med, learning how to be civilized and corrupt in towns and cities, climbing society’s ladders and jockeying for positions. They act like city people are smarter but anyone knows that’s cow poop. City people are just weaker. They’re servants and store clerks huddling together for safety against the ghosts and fears of their own pathetic imaginations, that they use to substitute for the real lives that they lost long ago, replaced by pictures on walls and silly love songs stuck in the head. The real poetry comes with the wind by the campfire; the real pictures are painted on the sky at sunset, lasting but a moment before the lights turn to darkness and souls take their rest. People of the steppes are hunters and herders, moving with the seasons and changing for their own reasons. They only need cities to prey on, to take what they need and leave the rest. A city of hunters only happens where a campsite becomes permanent and only then by convenience and circumstance, never necessity, for while a hunter may be IN the city, he is never OF the city. He’ll still have a little plot and a few animals, a view of the sky and a view of the future, ready to pack his bags at the slightest provocation, a roadmap etched in permanent memory.

The new landscape includes the web, of course, threatening to catch anything and everything in its sticky filaments. It’s hard to believe now that a computer was ever anything other than an Internet machine. Spreadsheets and databases gave way to e-mail and spam gave way to e-bay and e-banks gave way to MySpace and FaceBook. Now Second Life looks to take up where dreams leave off, a world inside the box, complete with land and money, milk and honey. For the conspiracy-minded this conjures up visions of bio-pods attached to TV screens by wires and tubes, getting their dreams and visions spoon–fed with oatmeal to produce fart-forced bio-gas for the cars in the real world upstairs. This should be where you look for losers and hustlers, a drug-like life for those who have none, hardly the place you find real men, the hunters and horsemen recently arrived from the steppes, right? The Next Big Thing may be fun and fashionable, good for Hollywood and Bollywood, maybe, but not much else, right? Business is done in tall towers; ‘firm’ people wear suits, right? Wrong. This is exactly where you find the hunters, along the borders, the frontiers where fear and boredom stop and Nature and creativity start, a line that crawls along the outskirts of towns and through the subconscious of individuals, fluid and flowing, shifting and re-shaping, to fit circumstance and forge the future. The Way is the main thing, not the bottom line, but the process and the progress. That is the American dream, civilization without cities.

Technology’s Rainbow in a Dumb-Down World

So now there’s a TV show called, “Are you smarter than a fifth-grader?” I’m glad people find our current ‘dumbing-down’ humorous. More accurately it should probably be called ‘dumbing-up’ since it doesn’t imply cultural backwardness. On the contrary technology seems to be the cause of the new ignorance. With so many machines to do so much of your thinking for you, why bother doing it yourself? Though statistics and percentages seem rather out of place when discussing degrees and states of consciousness, still it seems reasonable to see the brain as a muscle like any other, subject to atrophy with disuse. The greatest invention of the last century, the computer, has been reduced to R & R hero-worshippers getting their thrills being virtual friends with each other on MySpace, FaceBook, and others, saying brilliant things like, “Thanks for the add, man,” as though it’s only logical that someone’s sense of self-esteem would be dependent upon acceptance into a club open to anyone. Mostly it’s just harmless juvenile buddy stuff I figure, and beneficial in that some isolated alienated teenage potential artist/intellectual growing up in, oh I don’t know, say Bumfug, Mississippi, can find friends with common interests in other places that he’s having trouble finding at home. The only disturbing thing is that that kid may very well be in a highly diverse place like Berkeley, CA, with poorly developed social skills as a result of having adopted the computer as a surrogate friend and the Internet as a way of life instead of having normal relationships with normal people, real live girls in particular. As a tool the computer is incredible, as is Internet as a central database bringing together every sort of information from every conceivable source in one common space and format, available to random access in real time. It’s only as an end in itself, a way of life, that it all begins to look trivial and absurd and downright dangerous. But if it’ll make more people more content with a more compartmentalized life and save the vast Nature scenes for me, then it’ll all work out fine I guess. Don’t fence ME in.

The best part about the new social Internet is the expansion of democracy implied and intended, mostly in the fields of entertainment but also in politics. It’s certainly not inappropriate for YouTube to sponsor a presidential debate- though I’m sick and tired of seeing stupid video clips take over spaces formerly given to text- and it’s not inconceivable that ‘Internet revolution’ could at some point as easily refer to a revolution by Internet as one of Internet. Mostly though the most discernible impact is in the field of entertainment, whether good or bad it’s too early to tell. The recording industry is in a shambles. Is that bad? They’ve been in bed so long with the film industry that it’s hard to tell whether you’re watching a music video or a film trailer. That was when there were music videos, now mostly displaced by filler and fluff. So now they try to play FTSE with the fashion industry, as though we’re all just dying to see what Fergie and Will I. Am are going to be wearing at the Grammys. Three years ago Black-Eyed Peas were playing street fairs; now they’re waiting in line to host game shows, after having issued state of the union addresses from Moscow to Beijing. This is obviously the degenerate mop-up phase of urban music, long after ‘old school’, ‘new school’, and ‘classic phase’. Should I get some vicarious thrill at seeing self-proclaimed fashionistas wearing Calvin K.’s with their guys in penguin suits? These are the ‘alternative’ musicians, for God’s sake, preening and posing like Britney and Christina and Justin. I’m glad P. Diddy and Jay Z have as much money as Elton and Mick and God in less than half the time while espousing street values and ghetto revenge, but what happened to the music? That’s what you go to MySpace for. Everybody’s equal there. The Beatles stand right next to Townes Van Zandt right next to muddy Waters right next to the garage band down the street. You’re only as good as your stuff. YouTube’s doing the same with film and video. Want to finally see that Kenneth Anger film that you studied back in film school? It’s there, with Stan Brakhage, Jean Cocteau, and all the others, all for free. The written word, both literature and journalism, might be next, if anybody really cares. Neither of us, you or me, would be right here right now otherwise.

The bad thing about the continuing saga of ‘Net-head’ life is that social gaps in the world are getting wider and wider and some people, the vast numeric majority, are being left further and further behind. Less than twenty years ago I was sending and receiving telegrams, telegrams!, to and from Mexican towns that maybe had only one community phone. Wonder why cell phones have done so well in the third world? Creeping consumerism, maybe? How about no phone at all otherwise? Welcome to Cambodia. As advanced countries move into computer-based music formats such as MP3 and such, cassettes continue to sell well in Thailand, hardly the most backward country in the world, typically occupying about half the typical music store. Good luck finding a music store at all in Mali. Cassette vendors wheel their product through the streets on push-carts with the help of a car battery to blare their wares. The main division between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in the world is still two-dimensional- the gap between rural and urban gradually replacing the gap between rich and poor countries- but more and more the gap is becoming three-dimensionally vertical- one of access to technology and psychological conformity to the emerging international culture it promotes. This increasingly means intercommunication in fewer languages, with English far in the lead. On the other hand it also allows inter-communication among widely scattered but massively numerous communities of Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Malay, Quechua, Turkic, Swahili, and Slavic speakers, to the extent that they wish to do so. The first five certainly have and do. Whether the less typically ‘colonial’ and more typically ‘minority’ languages will take advantage of new technology to unite and strengthen their cultures remains to be seen. It will be hard if they have little or no access to the new technology.

‘Reality TV?’ Hand me a barf bag and an old-fashioned sitcom. The only ‘Reality TV’ I’ve ever seen that I liked was in Dublin about five years ago when I wasn’t even sure what reality TV was. Baile Atha Cliath? No wonder Gaelic is a dying language, and calling it ‘Irish’ doesn’t help. On screen were on-going scenes of a family, a real family, under constant surveillance. Tired of watching the teenage daughter sleep? Wait a few hours until she wakes up. Want some company while you clean house? Wait until Dad leaves for work, all on cable TV from the privacy of my hotel room, like ‘The Truman Show’, but real and without artificial plot points imposed, Reality, slow boring and infinite. For a spicier reality, I’ll take world music? I can’t get enough. What’s the bottom line on the intellectual future of the species? There is none. My Thai in-laws can’t use an ATM, log on to the ‘Net’, or even program a digital alarm clock. My wife’s son can, but can’t multiply up to the 10’s nor score above a ‘0’ in Chinese class no matter how slanted his eyes, and cheats his homework with impunity. A downtown bar girl can communicate with smile and innuendo where she leaves off with grunts and groans, but couldn’t find the countries she’s visited with her faan on a map, nor likely even know what continent they’re part of. Words fail and concepts fall short. Theories of relativity only go so far. Some things you just can’t plot on a graph or pie-chart. Is it a brave new world or a new world order or just same ol’ same ol’. You tell me.

WiFi Addicts Just Want Your Current, not Your Currency

Airports in America these days are starting to look like something out of The Matrix or Naked Lunch or something, fleshy mugwumps attached to triple-pronged sockets, sucking the black meat of power through long black cables. You can see them coming, eyes lowered to about a foot above floor level, scanning the walls back and forth looking for open sockets. They’ve got that look in their eyes, the psychological need for a plug-in. The longer they have to look, the worse it gets, eyes dilated, pulse throbbing, veins bulging with anticipation. These are about equally divided between computer laptop users and cell phone chargers. Of course laptop users are usually looking for a wi-fi signal too, and those usually aren’t free in airports, though Phoenix and Taipei are notable exceptions. JFK has free data ports, but how many people carry wires with them these days? You can cop a freebie in BKK down on the mezzanine level across from the airline offices. Don’t try this in Europe btw. Even if you can find a wi-fi signal, you’re not likely to find a socket to plug in to, even in places advertising ‘free wi-fi,’ of which there aren’t many. That’s not a bad idea actually, since many wi-fiers abuse the privilege and act like they have ancient rights. Some places limit the time allowed, but that can get messy if the user doesn’t voluntarily comply. Some have a code and use programming that counts your time down, but that requires a program. Limit the user to the charge capacity of their battery and you’ve solved most of the problem.

Of course a café doesn’t have to offer the service in the first place but it is a way to attract customers in a crowded coffee market until all your competitors do it also, and then you have to do it just to remain competitive. It’s a good deal for everyone as long as it’s not abused, because anybody who really wants a signal free can just walk or drive around until he finds one unlocked, not too hard in any country I’ve been in. ‘Wi-fi cafés’ are distinguished between those who offer the service free (w/ purchase) and those who don’t, but the former can be found in Mexico, Guatemala, Spain, Canada, and I presume many other countries in addition to the US. The latter can piss off. Why would anyone pay for two or three usages of anything that he could get at home for a month? Yeah, right, I forgot, stupid question. Europe is way behind on this, in both signals and plugs. Part of the reason is just that space is more dear in Europe, as in New York, and places frequently charge extra to sit down to drink that coffee rather than just standing at the bar. This is contrary to the spirit of wi-fi, which wants you to sit down and hang out, which in turn draws others, which in turn creates a dynamic pub-style entertainment, all in broad daylight without alcohol. The mullahs okayed coffee long ago, after much deliberation, to keep us awake during our long prayer sessions. Uh huh.

Still in New York you pay more to sit down at a table and listen to jazz than you do to sit at the bar, so prospects there are dim, though I did find it at the whole foods store down in Soho. Food was expensive; coffee was cheap. The situation with electric outlets is worse. They just don’t exist in public places in Europe, and sometimes not even in the cheapest hotel rooms. When they do, they may very well have locks on them. That’s right, locks on electrical outlets. I found one in the train station in Barcelona and guarded it with my life, not because I was afraid someone else would take it, but that someone would come charge me or tell me to de-plug. In America they’re frequently all taken even when widely available, even where the wi-fi isn’t free. When I was wi-fiing in the park in Barcelona, people seemed genuinely surprised at such a rare display, for while America was going bonkers over Internet, the rest of the world was going bonkers over cell phones. And while America is now catching up on the ultimate democracy of ‘one man one phone’ the rest of the world is still way behind on the net-head way of life. Maybe it’s better that way. Isn’t the sight of grown men and women attached by electric lines to the grid a bit of a scary sci-fi scenario anyway? It’s truly scary. I love it. It’s ironic. Not many years ago my supreme goal was to get off the grid. Now my goal is to get on.

Traveling with a laptop is a revolution and a revelation. What it adds in its own weight, it reduces in the weight of any books you might be tempted to travel with, if you’re so inclined. A 100GB hard drive can hold many books in memory, especially if you don’t need pictures. If you’ve got access to a wi-fi signal, then you’ll need even less, as you can get live up-to-date info all along, reserving rooms and flights as you go. While wi-fi cafes are certainly not universal, nor wi-fi hotels either, the signals themselves are, and many places don’t bother to lock them. Getting a cheap hotel next to a more expensive one is not a bad tactic, nor is getting upper rooms capable of receiving signals from many directions. You might find them easier at one time of day or the other. In countries where TV is scarce or negligible, this adds a whole new dimension to entertainment, also. If you’re actually going to watch DVD’s on your laptop, then a larger screen is preferable, but the novelty of that seems to be wearing off, and laptop sizes seem to be down-sizing accordingly after an earlier bump-up. I personally couldn’t imagine doing much Internet surfing from a telephone-size screen, but that’s just me. When traveling you’re carrying bags anyway, so that’s not an issue, and I personally prefer about a page-size laptop with accordingly light weight for most flexibility. This is a music machine also, but that doesn’t take much space. Of course you can burn or rip CD’s in addition to just playing them with a laptop, not to mention downloading if you’ve got a fast enough signal. In Europe many bands now have a laptop on stage, doing just what I’m not sure of, probably adding the trance-like effects so popular there.

Bottom line for me is that I write, so that’s the crucial size determinant, and a box too small is just not comfortable for that. Personally I don’t see much future for desktop computers regardless, considering their unattractiveness and the fact that those towers enclose mostly empty space. It’s just a matter of cost really. If laptop size is pretty well defined by its keyboard, then once components are small enough that that seems big by comparison, you shouldn’t have to pay a premium in cost or lack of quality any more. That day shouldn’t be far off, depending on which direction computers take in the coming era. Convergence of all media and communications- TV, radio, film, telephone-- into one Internet-accessible-and-dependent format-- is a likely guess since it’s already happening. At that point size is the only thing that matters, maybe a large box for the living room, smaller ones for remote locations and briefcase-size portability, and pocket-size one for constant access. Beyond that it’s anybody’s guess. Integration into personal adornment and even one’s body is not out of the question. At that point the Holy Grail of computerization, virtual reality, may be ready for a comeback, its previous incarnation but a wet spot on the bed of creativity and its true future only you-know-who knows how many years away. How far it will go and what it means to us as a species is another question. It sounds better than gene-splicing in any case. If we’re here for nothing more than to play with ourselves, let’s experiment with something we ourselves created, (self-) consciousness, and leave DNA alone. That’s not ours to mess with; we’re its. For now I’ll just keep slinking through the shadows of lightly-traveled streets looking for a rogue wi-fi signal so I can keep sending these messages in bottles to remote corners of scattered universes. My battery’s getting weak with age, but maybe I can find shore power somewhere. I may not be a star, but that’s not because I’m not shooting.