Love This Lethal, Stinkin' Town

December 26, 2004
Los Angeles Times

The following is an edited excerpt of a talk by author D.J. Waldie ("Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles") Dec. 7 at the Los Angeles Public Library, as part of the Zócalo Public Square lecture series (zocalola.org).

Because we've seen "True Confessions" and "L.A. Confidential," "Lost Highway" and "Blade Runner," we are certain we know what Los Angeles is. "Any reasonably intelligent American knows," say the authors of the satiric guide "L.A. Bizarro," "that Los Angeles is a rotten, stinking dump."

You and I can recite the city's defeated beliefs about itself like a catechism lesson for the regretful. What is Los Angeles? Los Angeles, for those lucky enough to get out, is a rite of passage and a fable of broken dreams.

The search for a usable story of Los Angeles -- an everyday history -- troubled this city 100 years ago. "How do we become 'indigenous' to this place?" the anxious new Anglo residents of Los Angeles asked at the turn of the [last] century. They were acutely aware that they lacked a story that would fit their American city into an unfamiliar landscape and one so recently appropriated from its Mexicano and Californio proprietors.

Now we buy so cheaply in Los Angeles and believe so easily, just take your pick of scriptures:
The story of Los Angeles is an elegy for a place of former perfection, a perfect place, once upon a time -- and the time was just before your new next-door neighbor arrived. That's our history of regret.

Or the story of Los Angeles is a kind of pornography, in which every real-estate cliche is a menace: The city's climate is actually lousy ... and the landscape is lethal (when it isn't burning with wildfires or shaking with earthquakes, it's crawling with fauna with a taste for suburban white meat). In its contempt for its subject -- in its belief that we're just along for the ride -- that story is our pornography of despair.

Or the story of Los Angeles is merely a spectacle of this uniquely intoxicated place and its intoxicated people.

Or there is no story of Los Angeles. The city has simply disappeared from the narrative, a victim of the regime of speed and erased by forgetfulness.

Many of its citizens believe Los Angeles has one, last title: unnecessary city.
Pity them. And pity the city they think is unnecessary.

Cities are not mere conveyances of public services. They have a moral purpose. The moral purpose of a great city is to shelter a maximal diversity of public settings in which citizens might acquire the ability to sympathize with the condition of others and act on those conditions by communal and political means.
Remembering is an act of courage in Los Angeles. Memory is sabotage against the city's regime of speed.
Environmentalist and writer Barry Lopez asks, "How can we become vulnerable to Los Angeles?"
Hunger for memory is one way. Take delight in the city's stories. Find yourself in its history. Long for a sense of place. Fall in love. But what would inspire your allegiance to Los Angeles?

This city has failed to give its residents what they critically need: reasons to be faithful to each other that go beyond the politics of shared grievances. This city has not inspired faithfulness because it has not offered much that stands against the easy belief that no shared loyalties are possible at all.
Los Angeles is a ruined paradise, I agree, and in desperate need of us.

It was the fate of Los Angeles -- I almost said the grace of Los Angeles -- to be the paradise we've ruined and, as a consequence, now our home.

His treasured Tijuana;
Federico Campbell frequently writes about the town of his youth, a scruffy yet idyllic place colored by memory.
 
November 1, 2004 
Los Angeles Times
By Reed Johnson, Times Staff Writer
 
MEXICO CITY--The novelist John Gardner supposedly once said there were two plots in all of literature: either you go on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. But as Federico Campbell sees it, for a writer, the voyage out and the return trip home are often parts of the same imaginative odyssey. Especially, perhaps, if your home happens to be a place like Tijuana.

Although he left the border region decades ago and now leads the life of a prominent man of letters here in the Mexican capital, Campbell periodically returns to Tijuana to visit his sisters, reunite with old friends or take part in literary conferences. For him, and for an earlier generation of transplanted frontera writers, he says, Tijuana remains "our Ithaca."

The reference, of course, is to Homer's epic poem "The Odyssey," in which the Greek hero Odysseus spends 10 years wandering at sea en route from the Trojan War, before finally arriving at his Ithaca home.

Similarly, the distant Tijuana of Campbell's youth is very much a tangible place that he revisits in his mind and in his writings.

Half-century-old memories still stir him: the scorching autumn winds blowing in off the desert; Hit Parade tunes piped in from San Diego; bars, cabarets and bullrings packed with U.S. day-trippers; and weekend exoduses across the border to shop at Woolworth's and J.C. Penney.
At the same time, Campbell is keenly aware that his sepia-tinged vision of postwar Tijuana -- a scruffy, provincial town of perhaps 60,000 souls -- has been displaced by today's sprawling, culturally dynamic metropolis of nearly 1.5 million, riddled with narco trafficking, corruption and painful questions about illegal immigration and identity.

Expect Campbell to tour his audience through a quasi-mythical landscape of memory and desire when he speaks tonight at L.A.'s downtown Central Library in the wide-open Zócalo "Public Square" lecture series.

The 63-year-old novelist and essayist says he intends to talk about "a very subjective Tijuana, very personal, a Tijuana of the memory," not the contemporary Tijuana that so fascinates academics and others scanning for semiotic signifiers along the borderlands.

"I don't identify very much with this 'problematic' " of Tijuana, says Campbell, sipping espresso at his book-filled home in Mexico City's bohemian Condesa neighborhood, where he lives with his wife.
"It's a subject for study by anthropologists, sociologists, journalists and the College of the Frontera Norte. I think that literature doesn't necessarily do this."

He also doesn't believe in overselling Tijuana's singular qualities or in hyping its significance in the context of contemporary Mexico. "I don't want to fall into this thing of, 'Oh, the most interesting border in the world! The Tijuanenses, we are so fascinating!' "

Amiable and erudite, Campbell does not confine himself to one corner of the planet, either in literature or in life. He ranges in conversation over a vast geographical, historical and cultural terrain. A casual mention of the lush Colorado River valley evokes a comparison with the Nile Delta. He segues into an anecdote about northern Mexico by mentioning that his favorite baseball team is the Arizona Diamondbacks, across the border from the Mexican state of Sonora, where he went to school.
Rather than mere name-dropping, Campbell's frequent cultural cross-referencing seems to reflect a mind for which art and literature are a kind of passport across divergent mental frontiers.
Reflecting on the plight of Mexican migrants trying to cross the desert into el Norte, he recalls T.S. Eliot's injunction in "The Waste Land" to fear "death by water." The modern economic refugee, traversing a different sort of no man's zone, must fear death by sunlight.

The son of a teacher and a telegraph operator, whose ancestors migrated to Mexico from Virginia in the 1830s, Campbell is a walking compendium of facts, stories and intriguing footnotes about Tijuana's transformation from turn-of-the-century speck on a map to chaotic urban hub.
Like his conversation, Campbell's writing is marked by desert-bright lucidity softened with gentle irony, a seductive combination of dreaminess and intellectual alertness. Although he moves easily back and forth from novels and short stories to essays, journalism and translations of such playwrights as Harold Pinter and David Mamet, Campbell believes in maintaining a certain separation between fiction and nonfiction. He writes regularly on political and social subjects, everything from assassinations to the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.

But Campbell believes in fiction's unique capacity to arrive at truth by recovering what Oscar Wilde called "the lost art of the lie." "Many times you can't cross the border between dreams and truth. Luigi Pirandello says that the truth can't be known because none of us is able to penetrate the mind of another," Campbell says, referring to the Italian modernist playwright.

Another great European modernist, James Joyce, casts a shadow over what is perhaps Campbell's best-known work, the short story collection "Tijuanenses," which was published by the University of California Press as "Tijuana: Stories on the Border." Like "Dubliners," Joyce's masterpiece about natives of his Irish home town, "Tijuanenses" is Campbell's fond, forgiving, backward glance at his own youth. "It is my bildungsroman," he says, "my 'American Graffiti.' "

In "Tijuana Times," perhaps the most clearly autobiographical story, he writes about the members of the Pegasos gang, who took their name from the flying-horse logo of Mobil Oil. Although you'd call them a gang, he says, they weren't like today's taggers and street toughs, but nice, middle-class kids whose idea of a big time was camping out on a hilltop with a big tub of beer singing Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill" and listening to Elvis on the San Diego stations.

"I believe, as [Jorge Luis] Borges says, the important thing for art is to be moving," Campbell says. "So we say that if there is any motivation in my stories, it could be it's a little nostalgia for Tijuana in the 1950s."

Other stories address themes of cultural dislocation, which also surface in his novel "Transpeninsular," about a missing writer. In the collection's concluding tale, "Insurgentes Big Sur," the narrator, torn between identifying with the U.S. or Mexico, observes that, "A city, I think, is like a person; either you know it well or not at all."

As one critic has suggested, the cities of Campbell's imagination are as much cities of the mind as physical places, and traveling to them requires a reliable inner compass. What's more, sometimes the stranger who comes to town, or returns there, is no stranger at all, but our self in a new guise.

*

Camera's Eye Must Provide Depth;
"Objective" journalism cuts us off from a world that is changing all around us.
September 12, 2004

Journalists and artists approach the human condition from different angles. What kind of art could they make together? Theater director Peter Sellars has devoted his career to sparking conversation across mediums. His recent staging of Euripides' "The Children of Heracles" brought refugees and immigration officials face to face in an intimate encounter. His productions of "For an End to the Judgment of God," Antonin Artaud's final text, and "Kissing God Goodbye," based on a poem by June Jordan, will premiere in October at the Roy and Edna Disney/Cal-Arts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles. Last month, he spoke at California Plaza about the challenges facing journalism and "the amount of pain that's going on in the world that is being treated as if there's no pain involved." The talk was part of the Zócalo Public Square lecture series (zocalola.org). This is an edited transcript.

*

We really do forget in our talk about media that communication only functions, at a minimum, in two directions. The question is reciprocity: What are the ways in which not only is someone speaking, but someone is listening? In what way is listening quite active? What does it mean to actually speak to someone you care about, about something you can't tell anyone else about? Where the act of communication begins to become honest -- in some way real, in some way personal, in some way committed -- and the first step in the healing process? So, it's not simply reportage, it's not simply observing from the outside, because the reality is we're all inside.
For me, this is really one of the hardest things with the way journalists, particularly television cameramen, are trained. So, you're there in the Sudan, and you have your camera trained on somebody who has nothing to eat, and then you go back to the Intercontinental Hotel and have your steak. What are you seeing through that camera? Are you looking in a way that you can walk away from that scene [of starvation]?

This notion that we don't want to change, but we're going to look at the world that's in the middle of changing, is one of the issues about commercial journalism: We don't have to change while we're looking at someone else whose life is being torn apart.

We live in this strange buffer zone in America, where, because of a certain material comfort, you don't realize that everything in the world does affect you directly. [It's] a kind of new medieval period, where the news has to circulate on the Internet and in late-night comedy shows because there is no other outlet, and where the official "marketplace of ideas" actually doesn't function as a marketplace anymore. The way people are voting, the way people are even understanding the world around them, has to do with what kind of information they are receiving. What is the dimension that is missing?

One of the hardest things right now is that we're getting our news in a very sanitized manner, because the cameraman is not supposed to have a nervous breakdown while filming, whereas it would be better if he did. If the cameraman did acknowledge what was in front of him, and we could watch with that sense that the eye taking those things in also finds them unbearable.

This whole idea that the camera is "objective," and that we're receiving our news "objectively," is one of the reasons we're not receiving the very history of our time. Because all the heat [of events] has been removed. All the threat has been removed. All the possibility and hope have also been removed. And we're in this strange statistical no man's land, where the news just carries on, and, meanwhile, people continue to die and starve to death.

So, what does it take to add that little extra something to the news that allows people to realize there are no observers, only participant observers, and that we are all participants? The 20th century was about spectatorship. That's over with. You're not watching it, you're in it. As Madge used to say on the Palmolive commercials, "You're soaking in it, dear."

You are soaking in it, and actually it is the moral and spiritual energy in your life, or it's the absence of moral and spiritual energy in your life.

Journalists are encouraged to report on a very narrow bandwidth of human experience. And, of course, human experience is happening in a very wide bandwidth. It's that depth of feeling and that spiritual resonance that is the motivating factor that says to all of us, "This can't go on any longer," and then asks us to search ourselves for the solution. Which turns out to be the finest moment of all of our lives, which we are denying ourselves in our passivity.

Writer Confronts Intifada Lethargy

by Michal Lemberger Contributing Writer
Jewish Journal
October 15, 2004

“I’m just so tired,” Israeli author Orly Castel-Bloom says. She’s not speaking about the effects of her recent flight into Paris, where she has come to deliver some lectures. Nor is it the interviews she has given since landing earlier in the day, although that has zapped her, too. It’s an existential exhaustion that keeps her thinking about sleep all the time these days.

Castel-Bloom, author of 10 books — the most recent of which, “Human Parts” (David R. Godine) has been translated into English — can’t get the state of affairs in her home country off her mind.
“Human Parts” chronicles the intersecting lives of ordinary, flawed Israelis trying to survive a bitterly cold winter that coincides with an increase in suicide bombings. The characters range from a Kurdish refugee washerwoman to the spoiled scion of a real estate family, but all live lives against the backdrop of terror that seems to incapacitate their ability to function fully.

The novel uses satire and absurdism to look squarely at contemporary Israeli life and society. For years, Castel-Bloom has thought about the social conditions of lower and middle-class Israelis: the prevalence of poverty, the constant need to pursue money just to scrape by. But she and her contemporaries refused to write about the political situation — the conflict with the Palestinians, the vicious fighting among Israelis about how best to deal with the situation. Now, however, it’s all she can think about.

And it’s tiring her out.

When asked how she copes, she responds quickly, “I sleep.”

Coming to Paris is a chance to close the drapes and shut out the world, even if only momentarily, although she knows that post-Sept. 11 realities will catch up with her; even here in France, where they fool themselves into thinking that they live in a dream of fraternite, protected against what has spread beyond Israel into the world.
“Israel is a laboratory. It’s a very radical situation. Look, my daughter is going to the army; she has to take two buses to get there, but she’s a new driver. So should I let her take the two buses or give her my car. She doesn’t use the side mirrors, I just found out last week, which is very dangerous.... These are the kinds of existential questions we have to ask.”

Motherhood itself, says Castel-Bloom is cruel in Israel, where children grow up with a casual knowledge of death from the first. She recently took her 12-year-old son and his friends to a disco so they could dance to the music of Fifty-Cent and Nelly. There, she overheard them debating the relative chances of getting killed in a discotheque versus a restaurant.

She can only hope that when his turn for army service comes around, he won’t end up in some of the more dangerous platoons. That, and that Israel will become a better place for her children in the future. What else is a mother to do?
Asked if there is anything that gives her joy or solace these days, Castel-Bloom cites “Seinfeld,” gardening and her work.

“It’s hard to write these days,” she says. “I try to write objectively, especially after ‘Human Parts.’ I’ve been trying to retreat from myself, but my situation is so s——y that I retreat from writing. Still, I write, even though I write about reality. It’s the monster I can’t get rid of, but it’s still a way out of the despair.”

For all the uncertainty that has infected Israeli life, Castel-Bloom believes in the necessity of the Israeli state, not just for herself — although as a writer she requires immersion in the language and life of the country. She would understand if her children wanted to move away, to go somewhere where they wouldn’t have to worry about the relative lack of safety of riding a bus or driving a car. But she has to stay. Besides, she couldn’t leave the climate: Tel Aviv; the beach. One day, she says, she will swim in the ocean every morning with the other grandmothers.

As a second-generation Israeli, one who did not help build the country but inherited it, she never thought that she would end up having to fight for her own existence, for her country’s existence, and that the struggle would leave her, her neighbors and friends, so worn out. In the end, she thinks, exhaustion on both sides, Israeli and Palestinian, may be the only way out of the current state of affairs.

“The intifada must stop immediately and peace should be achieved immediately or else I will go to sleep all day,” she says. “I can’t bear it.”

Orly Castel-Bloom will speak Thursday, Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. about “A Fragile Life: Terror and Satire in Contemporary Israel” at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, 3663 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles as part of the Zócalo Public Square Lecture Series. To R.S.V.P., visit zocalola.org.