methodology
photo by Helmut Newton
The Narcissist’s Retort
written by Mary Jean Tims, c. 2007
Los Angeles is a reinvention of an invention already taking place in another time and another face, colliding at intersections blending textures, primary colors, creating a place in the reflection of all others, streaming in the consciousness of an automobile, soaking up the sunshine and the exhaust of petroleum, linoleum flooring and mass production, sprawled out and still too close, touching while traveling at 85 miles per hour, glaring under the mist of the street lights at night and the coyotes that walk the city more often then people, the backyards full of unused green, and front yards full of gasoline, a narcissistic flight from realism, defamiliarize, decontextualize, while posing in front of a gigantic mirror the length of Wilshire Boulevard, hoping to overturn, unveil, its ordinary and new, its fluid foundation with voyeuristic eyes that gaze from the hills of Hollywood down on the highways and flyways that are filled with battling engines, waiting for the rain, the quakes of the earth, the landslides, the tidal waves and splitting of the continent, and the movie stars giving birth, to get it all on film for the new release, peace, peace, piece of the action, attraction, detached and cliché, you can have some or not, televisions in every room one for each eye, as the 1940′s and 50’s birthed the paths of the automobile and 1973 was when we finally understood that the commodity is not paying the bills and there are places we don’t go when we travel, because the city had been divided and displaced for a new work in progress, on a grid in a square that shoved itself into oblong indistinguishable geometric patterns of geographical unpredictability; going once, going twice, sold to the highest bidder, hell bent on reinvention of the American Dream that ignored all the advice and now there are sad clowns under the tent of compliance, so it is time to temporarily redefine commuters, computers, actors, waiters, hostesses, busboys, White boys with popped collars and Latin boys in cowboy hats, Korean grandmothers rolling joints while waiting for the signal on the commuter roads and the actor in his Hummer and the French waiter for some water and the Black hostess with that savvy stare, busboys on the stairs that turn outward from the thresholds of urbanity as eternity gains momentum in this one room on this one block in this one city in the nowhere of this one county that is larger than all of them will ever know even while they are sleeping, and 1992 was a nightmare in most minds when social unrest found its way through the streets of Los Angeles and postmodernism flourished as the marginal lifted themselves from the flatlands with fists full of poverty, oppression, intolerance and rage and the White Man fell to his knees, but it isn’t over yet, so we challenge what is different, question what is juxtaposed: male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, mother, father, pedagogy, theology, fear, happiness, consciousness, self, material, form, sensuality, choice, birthright, White, Black, backstreets, super highway, and once all this gets sorted out we will have to restructure the dream, make new what has made wrong, retell history from a place left behind and line the streets with wisdom that buried itself deep within lactating cries muffled by the voices behind the bowties, and the words we use aren’t really the appropriate words to define who we are, because there is a television that sits in every eye projecting a person into the mirror on Wilshire Boulevard that is distorted, obscured, and full of lies, an aesthetic phenomenon formulated beyond compromise, and petroleum is filling up the L.A. River while starvation sets in, but it is time to jump on a concrete people-mover for over an hour to another face, another place where brake lights glimmer in the smog and the angst settles on the foreheads of pilots gone mad while snickering to a radio show that doesn’t know it is snowing out here and the cars are sliding off the edges because they forgot their chains, it is just another day in L.A., sun blazing purple and pink chlorofluorocarbons like back fire or misfire a consciousness worn thin in a metropolis so bare that it has no place for the people, no walking, just parking, parking, parking, meters, valets, tow away, intersection before interjection, what is it going to be, you, me, we, take the time this time, because our patience is much worn, free, stolen, bought, plagiarized, familiarized, discovered, lost, thrown over a threshold in a white gown, wilted under a mothers frown…identity, we have only just begun and it is already nearing the finish line, times up, time is lost, time and time again, no time to lose, take the time, one more hour until the sun folds the sky into dark and pulls the sheets off the moon, over a county, over a city, over a nowhere, in a room full of you, me, we.
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