“listening to the dream”: Fire and Teargas, Graduation and Light: LA Journal
Next stop Los Angeles.
I remember the riots in LA when I graduated from college, the fire flowing into the sky from downtown that May of 1992 as the riots started. History felt alive, then as now, alive, ever flowing.
Riots past as prologue, may the circle be unbroken.
“ICE is bullshit,” says the graffiti on the boarded up building near Pershing Square.
“Free them!!!”
“ICE = Trash.”
“ICE melts in my buttcrack”
I follow the sound of police sirens and cops to the demo.
The sound of helicopters reminds me.
Golden light in our faces.
Some guys sell Mexican flags telling me about their brother arrested the night before.
National Guard stand about, protesters in their masks jeering them.
At the CO Op free books bin, I pick up a book about the Balkans, the conflicts, wars in ourselves, reading it all break long, careening through the city, listening, watching.
A driverless food delivery robot crosses my path.
June 12
LA really is a city of light. Birds fly about the old buildings, along the waterfront. Geese run about the lake in Echo Park. People cook blue corn tortillas in Mcarthur Park. We woke up in Venice, greeted the day, the morning light. Careened down Venice Boulevard from Westwood to the 10 East, down Alvarado, where it looks like Mexico City, down to Filipinotown, to Echo Park for sticky rice and mangos, to Silver Lake, to a German beer hall where they were singing old Marlene Deitrich songs. Warnings about a curfew filled the phones, national protests against the deportations. Our cities are made of, shaped by immigrants. Of course in L A's case, it was Mexico long before the gringos came along. As Cher says in Clueless, it does not say RSVP on the statue of liberty. Ahh, Los Angeles.
June 13
LA is popping. You can't walk a block in downtown without finding boarded up buildings, 'fuck ice' graffiti, people with flags, many mexico flags. This was Mexico a lot longer than its been the US. Curfew is about to start. Cops lined up about the Fed Building. People tell stories of the cops randomly arresting people, detaining people, throwing their stuff out. There's a lot of cops out there. But how to get them to join us, instead of detain people? I've seen both in my life. LA City of Angels, showing us a lot.
June 14
LA is full of wildly imaginative people, funky coffee shops. We talked about Tompkins Square Park, looked at the skaters, jumped in the water and told old stories. Greetings from.Venice, the most fun neighborhood in the USA.
June 15
A crazy day in la. No kings protests everywhere in the streets, everywhere in Berlin New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, peaceful rally after rally. News from rallies across the country, graduation events at the university for the humanities. Talking with a Medievalist with my kid, she said, you must be the granddaughter of Dorothy Shepard. She's a great scholar, she said to us. We talked about her influence on us. The trips to Italy and the cloisters with her. Strange days she said. I know. She mentioned events in Minnesota. What happened I asked. Democratic State Rep and her husband were killed, second state rep and his wife were wounded 1.5 hours later. A manifesto found. Very Weimar. Earlier in the day, a friend said he thought someone would be killed. I guess he was right. We met the kids profs and friends.
The speeches to the graduates recalled those days. I'm George Baker, the head of the art history dept. I want to acknowledge the many challenges the students went through the years, from the pandemic, to an assasination threat. Congratulations again.
At UCLA alum and writer Carribean Fragoza spoke:
“...its impossible to be here and not mention what is happening in LA,” she began, “when undocumented are disappeared, where the earthquakes, the fire has been speaking to us on these indigenous lands, above the artificial border, when we are being extinguished, incarcerated, the fire is speaking through people, through the activists. Free Palestine is not difficult to understand, liberation for all, from Gaza to LA. This city has been tested many times, the Watts Riot of 65, the Riots in 1992. I craved something, to be free, the fire seemed like a promise, I saw it in 1994 in the prop 187 protests, the uprisings, we are seeing fires that took over la in January, realize who the helpers are, who helps, who swoops in and profits, a fire when we can fight back...we can have a home within us. I learned to find something here. We need to find something in each other. The strategies for survival are there, building community is a tool for survival.”
Our kid found a community here in between it all. I remember those fires after the riots in 1992. And walking her through the snow, dropping her off at JFK airport in January, when she arrived into the fires. And found a community of support.
We left the graduation, went to Canters deli on Fairfax, for a snack, and up into the hills, across Sunset and Mohalland Drive, to a party in Laurel Canyon at the house designed by an Italian futurist with a pool that looked like a David Hockney painting. Hung out for a stretch. We talked about the city and immigrants who make it. It's disgusting what's happening, said one. Now my farmers market is empty. Said goodbye. Brought the teenager to Florence and Normandie, in the old South Central, back through the protests, through the curfew zone, cops and Mexican flags everywhere. Traffic. Through the city of quartz. Back to Venice.
June 16
Woke up early, scrolled through the majestic pictures of No Kings demonstrations across the world, made our way to Silverlake, to the flea, where the L Word vibe is everywhere, 'girls don't block girls' says the poster, and Hold On Holy Ghost is playing, techno filling the air, back to echo park, out to Jet Rag, best vintage around, out to Cactus Taqueria on Vine, for a dip at Venice Beach meeting up with old high school buddies, Judy and Adrienne, swimming, along the threes company stroll, bodies and bikes, colors on the waterfront, meeting Ade’s cool kid, out to a drum circle as the sun went down, dancing bodies on the beach, talking about it all, comparing notes on the world, Ade and Judy... friends4ever... Guyana Punch ... WHAM rap... thousands of bad lyrics later, we’re all still standing, talking it out. magic light, magic Los Angeles.
June 16
JOAN DIDION says...
“It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.”
June 17
Crazy week careening around the city, cheering the protesters, supporting the college kid, out to the abyss of adulthood, going to the beach, our to Maxine's, a loopy cafe on Washington for huevos rancheros every morning, catching up with friends, everyone making due. Some are documenting; others disrupting deportations, the national guard out on the streets, ominous arrests, disappearances, everyday life goes on. The brown shirts arrived. The kid is staying. The rest of us are making our way back home. Others are not so lucky.
Looking up, a driverless Waymo's vehicle was crossing the street, on the way back.
At LAX, the missing pieces were many, thinking about the people I saw, kids and friends growing up, one had a surgery on his pancreas, still struggling with happiness, another had a kid, who suffers from dyslexia, struggling with reading, another’s hip broke, so he was in the hospital. I couldn’t come see him. I had to come home early. The college kid is finding their LA sealegs. I remember when they got to LA, I had no idea where to go. They jumped on the bus and explored, riding down the 405 South to Long Beach, to Hollywood, exploring the City of Quartz, its lights, its drum circles, its junk shops, punk spots, where a guy named Puerto Rico sells T shirts, finding something here, sometimes in the lost spaces, the abandoned carnivals, cheap sushi spots, roller rinks, and music venues on the East Side. Off to lunch at Canters, for sticky rice in Echo Park, to the flea in Melrose, in Silverlake, to protests and teargas downtown, where another friend learned what it tastes like fresh from the riot police canisters, strolling along the walking path at Venice Beach, where the sun went down and a city that was Mexico reminded us to keep it funky. Another contemplated a reboot, wondering what's the best dose, for a new perspective. A mother screams at her son after he graduates. I’m going to kill myself, she tells him. Another student faces probation after taking part in protests; she cuts herself. The harms are many. It's a complicated city, few subways, even less buses, even more cars and car culture, strip malls and chain stores, fossil fuels burning in the city of quartz, cars in motion, even as New York passed its Heat Act, moving our city forward.
“I didn't come here to fight. I came here to cover a story,” wrote Ryan.
“You are missed every day, every way,” says the mural.
Sascha re arranged his books and went swimming with me, jumping deep into the water, telling me about the fractals, a metaphor in Los Angeles, with complex systems, urban sprawl, inequality, on and on.
And the New Yorker looked back on the week that was when we navigated a graduation and a set of fires, tear gas, those condemning and those celebrating a hot immigration mix.
Antonia Hitchens wrote in the New Yorker:
“Around the capital before Saturday, people mused about whether Donald Trump’s long-desired Army-anniversary parade—which cost $45 million and coincided with the President’s 79th birthday—would be something like Tiananmen Square. In other cities, a series of “No Kings” protests were scheduled for the same day. Laura Loomer, a MAGA influencer, had cautioned her followers to “stay strapped when you’re in public this weekend.” On the day of the parade, in what appeared to be an act of political violence, in Minnesota, two Democratic lawmakers were shot by a gunman impersonating a police officer, according to officials.
But as Antonia Hitchens stood in the crowd with teen-agers in period garb, in D.C., the city had the “eerie, abandoned feel it gets before big staged events,” she writes. The occasional pedicab driver rode down the empty downtown streets, cordoned off from traffic by D.C. trash trucks. Tanks that had arrived from around the country had been sitting idly on the Mall for a few days; a summer thunderstorm was now threatening to rain out the President’s parade. An ad on Craigslist circulated, offering a “flat fee of $1,000 paid in cryptocurrency” to seat fillers in red hats and gold accessories “for space maximization and attendance.”
A friend of Hitchens, who grew up in East Germany, said that the scariest thing she saw was a robot dog, at an Army fair that had at an Army fair that had taken place earlier in the day. “This was nothing like the military parade that I experienced every year until the fall of the wall, in 1989,” she said. The sparse crowds for Trump’s parade were charming to her—you can offer to pay people on Craigslist, but, in the U.S., you can’t force them to attend. Even most Republican lawmakers sat the event out. Read more: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/PedqEh
As Randolfe Wicker wrote:
“Lately, public political life has been very depressing. Today, marching in a cold drizzle down 5th Avenue in NYC with thousands of diverse "NO KINGS" demonstrators, I found new hope for this country. It was exactly like the 1960s when more and more people were discovering that the Vietnam War was pure folly & they were determined to do something about it! But, today's marchers were not just mostly young. These were not hippies trying to wake up the world. They were people of every age, every race, every social class. Today, I found hope in the rebirth of the country I thought was both ignorant and dying. The "melting pot" of America had congealed into one solid cannon-ball of steel. The small numbers of young people reminded me of the price we pay for not including "civics" in schools today. The "free education" of my youth in the 1950s has been replaced by a commercialized industry -- one that instead of opening doors for the young, leaves them burdened with debt. A society that doesn't invest in it's young is doomed to a slow and ugly suicide. The crowds today, with their energy and compassion, give me hope that instead of returning to the past MAGA-style, we will restore only the few good things we have lost: free education, opportunity for self-employment, the USA waking up to the lack of true equality for all races.”
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