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From America: California Chic and Whad up Boss Man?
Los Angeles is a city in the way a prism is a piece of glass - how and when you look at it can dictate what you see.
In Venice Beach, California (an LA district), many of the boardwalk’s storefront names convey an eclectic and relaxed mix: Gonzo Africa, La-La Land, Zen Massage, Glass & Water Pipes, Mao’s Kitchen and House of Ink Tattoos. There are several medical marijuana stores (“The doctor is in today,” hawkers call out). Well, you get the picture. Venice is a California beach community that prides itself on the anomaly.
The boardwalk is a calamitous mixture of residents, skateboarders, surfers, tourists, vendors, performers, shops and restaurants, body builders, streetballers, paddle tennis players and sunshine - an abundance of it, with an azure blue Pacific Ocean serving as the backdrop to it all. Its breezes cool the roller-blade, running and bicycling enthusiasts zipping along the concrete paths in the sand. Young men promoting music hand out CD’s: “Whaddup boss man…I got a sweet mix for you.”
There is clearly an indigenous Venice Beach ‘look.’ It’s kind of a hip, ratty, contemporary combination of LA casual chic with some ‘I don’t give a #$%&’ thrown in. Some appear as if they put on whatever was stuck between their bed and the wall when they awoke, or, have craftily attired themselves to gain that effect. Others give the impression that they came to the beach years ago and never left, and those years seem to have been good ones.
In the early 1900’s the original landowners had canals dug in the marshes surrounding the beach (thus the Venice name) to drain the area for development. Tidy and often exquisite bungalows line those canals, swathed in vividly-flowering foliage. Little bridges and walkways straddle the canals. Celebrities live among the 40,000 or so residents of this wealthy Los Angeles enclave. Jim Morrison of The Doors once lived in Venice. Arnold Schwarzenegger worked out there before stardom. The famed Chiat/Day Advertising Agency (now known as TBWA\Chiat\Day, part of TBWA Worldwide) once had its headquarters in Venice where - long before the iPad or iPod - it created ads for the Apple Macintosh computer. But the action in Venice Beach is on the boardwalk.
And for all its laid-backness, there also lurks a subtle and somewhat disquieting vibe to the boardwalk. The O-Mega Stun Guns (100% legal) store seems telling, and betrays the ‘go with the flow’ attitude of the majority. And there seems to be a festering animosity between some of the street vendors and city authorities. I spoke with Tom, a self-described, self-taught ‘sage’ who has been street-vendoring his services on the boardwalk for seventeen years. Tom is thin with long hair going to gray. Initially, he complained about efforts by the city to “tax street vendors” and when I inquired about what exactly he does as a sage, he volunteered that he “Tries to get these earthlings straightened out. If I were Jesus, I wouldn’t know where to begin.” I asked Tom what he did before he became a sage. “Bicycle repairs and stuff,” he answered. We shook hands and I took note of his firm grip.
When traveling in California, with the exception of the original Spanish missions that the Franciscans established here as they migrated north from their Spanish colonies to the south, nothing strikes me as being very old at all. In fact, most of California seems to still be in its infancy. Its past is knowable, but not particularly memorable. I sat outside one of those missions recently (Mission San Juan Capistrano) south of Los Angeles, sipping coffee and marveling at the contrast of the ‘newness’ which surrounded the aging - and in some places crumbling - mission. Venice Beach is also a study of contrasts, though more observably human than structural.
In spite of the Golden State’s well publicized economic problems and political divides, enclaves like Venice Beach still afford the non-native visitor a glimpse of a seemingly unattainable - and so utterly Southern Californian - lifestyle; a light-filled, sanguine medley of optimism and verve amidst a skeptic-free landscape that seldom takes itself all that seriously. It is a place where futurists are comfortable; historians less so. Native Californians have an accent too, though it is subtle and hardly detectable. But it can be noticed, and it is pleasing to the ear - to me resembling nothing more so than the sound of bicycle tires rolling down the smoothest of streets.
