west LA fade away

It might be the light as much as anything else. We Angelenos are blessed with a perpetual lightshow. The curtains can be drawn anytime, anyplace. The blinding white light as you drive up Ventura Boulevard on a summer day at high noon. The eerie incandescence of a sunrise viewed from atop Mount Wilson. The spectacular November and December sunsets on the beach up in Malibu or down in San Pedro. Or just the way the sun reflects off certain buildings in Mid City. So yeah, the light is what sustains my attachment to this place. There are other things, too, but the light is very special here. And it's the kind of thing that can be easily ignored amidst all the shit one has to contend with every day. But it's important now and again to appreciate the light. It's a little thing, but it's also as big and all encompassing as it gets. Let there be light. It's good to take stock of those little big things that you tend to overlook, things that you realize make your life a little better if you just stop and notice them.

I was feeling wistful a few nights ago, more than usual anyway. For all the disappointments and feelings of betrayal I complain about, the truth is that I let people down as much as they do me. I'm aware of this. I walk around with it. It bothers me. I'm not there for the people I care about as much as I could be, and the man I've become is not the guy others want me to be. I know I can be insensitive, crude, rude, or just checked out, wrapped up in my own narrowness. I haven't always lived up to my potential. I could be so much more. I could be a gentler, nicer, more considerate person. But then again, to be all these things I'd have to be somebody different. Maybe I'd be better, maybe not, but I'd definitely be different. I may evolve or devolve in certain ways, but not much. Not anymore. I push people away - family, potential friends and romances, professional ties - because I've always had the feeling that others try to will me to be somebody else. I would like to be liked, loved, accepted, as I am, and not as I could be if only...

I had a few hours to kill in West L.A. the other night, a gap of time between an appointment with my psychopharmocologist and my regular shrink. How fitting! I suppose it was my sorrowful mood that compelled me to snap photos of dingbats. I didn't decide in advance that I wanted to take these pictures. It happened spontaneously. The light was perfect and my mood was right. It was an ideal confluence of the external and the internal. ...I'm not a photographer. This much is obvious from these pictures. But the wonder of the LA lightshow is that you don't have to be a good at it. You just have to have a camera and the light. That light. So I just went for it. It makes sense to me now because the dingbats, the ones that haven't been razed yet, are a faded architectural artifact of L.A.'s mid-century optimism, and nowadays they seem like gravestones, modest monuments to something that keeps slipping further and further away. They speak to me.

It's funny how cultural revisionism asserts itself like an iron law of history. It was not that long ago that dingbats were still viewed as the perfect expression of everything wrong with Los Angeles: The absolute primacy of the automobile. The surface with no depth. The cheapness and ephemerality. The dominance of mass production. The acceptance of mechanized alienation as a way of life... And then at some point, as the dingbates have gone more deeply into decay, with many of them disappearing altogether, a nostalgia for them has begun to set in. There's now a lot of great material on the internet dedicated to the appreciation and even preservation of the dingbat as an important civic and historical relic. This is just one example. And you just know there must be at least a dozen dissertations that have been written on digbats in the last few years at UCLA's School of Urban Planning, where pomo perversity is a religion. So the dingbat is finally having its time in the sun. It's about time, I say.

I dug dingbats from the first time I saw them. But I'm certainly no trailblazer in this respect. In the early 70s, Reyner Banham published his classic, Los Angeles: The Ecology of Four Architectures, and he may have been the first to go against the prevailing taste in his favorable assessment of dingbats. But I didn't know anything about urban theory when I moved to LA in the spring of 1992 - three days before Florence and Normandie, btw. The first building I lived in was a dingbat on Barry Avenue in West LA. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to drive to it the other night to snap a photo, but it was a great first apartment. It really was. I loved it. It was what I would consider to be a late-period incarnation of the form, built in 1967, so just outside the Golden Age of the dingbat, approximately 1957 to 1966. The one-story walk-up studio apartment I lived in was nothing more than a purely functional box with a kitchen and crapper. The walls were paper thin. I could hear conversations, farts, stereos, sex, televisions... from apartments on either side of me, as well as from the apartment underneath me. It was like the people were in the same room with me. The carport was in the back and you had to enter into it via an alley. West LA is replete with these kinds of alleys. If you ever watch shows like Adam-12, or Dragnet, or Emergency, or Chips, there's usually some action taking place in one of these alleys. They're trashy and ratty and dirty and gross, but there's something about them that I find mesmerizing. They're intestinal pathways, ugly mechanisms that keep things moving and make it all work.

Dingbats are so emblematic of Los Angeles. I know they exist in other cities as well like San Fraccisco, San Diego, Miami, Pheonix... Someone I work with even told me he's seen dingbats in Sao Paulo. But, let's face it, the dingbat is an LA thing. I was initially drawn to them by virtue of their sheer wackiness. They imbued me with a sense of LA as a place where anything is possible and where weird shit happens. I also appreciate the way they're so resolutely tasteless. It's deep emotional response. I grew up in a household which at times could be quite snooty.

My parents are both from lower middle-class families, but they're strivers, not just in terms of the making of more and more money, but also when it comes to refinement, culture and, yes, taste. They're a text book example of Bourdieu's theory of distinction. I think I've already written about this bit, so it obviously weighs on me quite a bit. It's good to get it all out... My parents go to the opera, to the theater, to chamber music. They really only associate with other middle-class cum upper-middle-class strivers. It all had a lot of advantages for me in the way I was raised. I grew up in comfort, with lots of domestic help floating around the house all the time. College was all paid for, and my parents gave me a lot of help going through graduate school. There are much, much worse circumstances I could have been thrown into. But the cultural part, the distinction thing, I found all that pretty oppressive. It made me wanna...

That's it. Get it all out. It feels good. Where the hell was I anyway? ...I think the point I was trying to make is that there are deep emotional and psychological reasons for me to be drawn to bad taste, hence the ongoing magnetism of dingbats for me... West LA is one of several hotspots in the city for dingbats. I think the best dingbats are in Palms, right around Motor Ave, just north of Venice Blvd. But you also see some doozies in Culver City, West Hollywood and Mid City. You don't really see nearly as many dingbats on the east side of town, probably because it was developed earlier and a lot of the residential buildings that were built from the turn of the century through the 1940s are still standing.

The dingbats that remain are very much in decline. The paint's pealing, the structural beams are cracked and starting to give, the real estate developers are licking their chops. I want to cherish them while I still can. They mean a lot to me, as corny as that sounds. They remind me that I managed to escape. I'm proud of myself for having done that. But what did I escape to? I don't know anymore. I've lost my sense of purpose. I think this is the real reason I love the dingbats. They're from another time, one that gets smaller in the rear-view mirror every day. But the strongest ones survive. They may be old and tasteless, but they have a dignity about them. I like that. It's something to strive for. We'll survive together, me and those old dingbats. We'll have each other. We'll have the city. We'll have the light...