(07/03/05) THIS IS A LONG ENTRY. I WANTED TO TELL YOU EVERYTHING.

HERE IS A VIDEO FROM THE SUNSET STRIP:

Watch Lanette and Kevin

OH BEVERLY HILLS!

I started out this project hoping to foil my expectations, not compound them, but Beverly Hills has revealed itself to be disappointingly predictable. I should’ve paid heed to the dog that wanted to gnaw on my ankles as I entered the city limit because ever since I arrived in this neighborhood I’d’ve felt warmer and more welcome had I set up camp in a butcher’s walk-in freezer.

THE GUY IN THE PINK SHIRT:

I had the stroller and was waiting at the lights of Beverly Drive and Wilshire when some youngish entertainment industry suit asks me what I’m doing with the camera. I figure I’ll give him a one sentence answer. I say, ‘I’m walking the whole of LA and talking to people I meet on the streets and making a film about what happens when I do’ but really I don’t say all that coz I get as far as ‘walking the whole of LA’ when the lights change and he just grunts and disposes of me - just starts walking off in his pink shirt, his hands in his pockets, his colleague keeping pace and they resuming their conversation as if he’d never been interested, never asked me a question - as if I’d chased him down and stopped him in his tracks and begged him to listen to what I’m doing, to participate in it. As he walked in front of me I ached for him to slow down so I could catch up and just ask straight out what happened to him that makes him think that it’s okay. What sanctions him to be an asshole? His job? His shirt? I’m genuinely curious coz maybe then I could cultivate some understanding, but meanwhile I’m fed up of feeling like a welcome mat with a ‘please wipe your feet on me’ sign as I have done the whole time I’ve been doing my project in this area. The most gutting aspect has been not to be able to get any of it on tape.

CAMILLA PARKER-BOWLES

A Camilla Parker-Bowles look-alike with her two teenage daughters are walking along the north part of Beverly Drive. Camilla’s trying to read the blurb on my stroller as we walk in step with each other. She looks very curious about what I’m doing. So I hand her a postcard. She takes it and reads, at most, the title of the project and the first sentence of the blurb. She lets out a reflexive, high-pitched chuckle like a little nay from a neurotic pedigree horse. And then she motions to give the postcard back to me as if merely holding it for too long would infect her. I look her in the eye and say to her, in an even tone, ‘You don’t want to keep it?’ I want her to pause for a moment and see a breathing , feeling organism in front of her. Then she burps out, ‘No!’. Her tone is low, disdainful, cold. She wanted to tell me something in that ‘no’. She wanted to tell me that I was a piece of shit.

MELROSE PLACE:

A day or two before I’d been skirting the periphery of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. I walked along Melrose Place to a private gallery I’d shown one of my paintings at a few years ago and also an interior design showroom that had wanted to show my prints. Obviously, I had the stroller with me. I
considered going in to say hi to the gallery owners – I heard them in the garden out back, but it had been a long day of cold receptions – walking along the Sunset Strip and along the part of Melrose by the Bodhi Tree and Urth Café. These were wealthy, insulated people too and I felt it’d be too hard for me to stomach if they were patronizingly indulgent toward me and my contraption, enquiring out of etiquette about my project with the added incentive of being able to judge with impunity. This may have been a hasty presumption on my own part but I decided against going in and moved on.

DISTANT COUSINS:

A few doors down there’s an antique carpet showroom with the name ‘B*****’ on the sign. (I’m not going to write the actual name.) It’s the kind of place you can’t just walk into, you have to ring the bell. The kind of a place with only a few items there for sale, one alone enough to cover a few months of rent and expenses.

On the door there is a sticker that links the store to the British Antiques Association or something like that. In England, I grew up with the B*****’s. My background is Ladino Jewish. My family came from a part of Turkey that now belongs to Greece. From a ghetto where only Ladino was spoken – a nearly dead language mostly derived from Spanish because the Jews that lived in that ghetto had come centuries before from Spain during the Inquisition. I’m from a tight knit community where everyone is related by, at least, their great-grandparents. There aren’t that many B*****’s in this world and those that are, you can be sure came from Turkey at most a hundred years ago. And they probably came via England anyway. The people in my community most often dealt in carpets – antique or, as in the case of my own family, regular domestic carpeting. I’m cousins with many of the B*****’s. So, out of curiousity, I leave the stroller on the path by the store and look in the window. I think I might go in and talk to them. Find out if they’re related to the B*****’s I grew up with.

The guy that looks like the owner stands on the other side of the glass, looking out at the street. He looks bored. He’s drinking something out of a silver goblet. He looks like a lush. He’s tall, grey, chubby. He wears his shirt tucked into his trousers. He eventually clocks me and stares. Stares directly at me, and his face becomes glazed. I walk closer and stand by the door. I have to shade my eyes with my hand to see beyond the light reflected in the glass to look at the bright greens and pinks on the carpets and gold-leafed furniture inside. They glow. They seem medieval. I’m smitten. But then I feel the guy inside staring at me. He can see I want to come in. That I’m curious. And he doesn’t move for a second or two. Then he looks me directly in the eye and turns his back on me. Faces a woman behind a desk I hadn’t noticed before. She sits frozen in her seat, rigid. But her eyes dart over in my direction, even though her neck doesn’t move at all. And they both have seen me. They know I know they’ve seen me. They know I know they’ve decided not to let me in. I don't bother ringing the bell.

I then walked past the window to get to the light to cross the street. The cold woman, and then the man, stare at me again. I attempt a smile. A small smile. Tempered and meant to prove my sanity somehow. I look her directly in the eye and she looks back at me. She doesn’t smile. Her eyes escort me to the curb. And then they resume not doing whatever they weren't doing beforehand I guess.

Those people could have had no idea on earth why I was there or what I wanted. But they sure as hell were convinced they knew. They were convinced they knew all they needed to know. They thought they had me down, and they were wrong. I felt deflated and defeated. It's hard not to form rigid opinions about a place when you encounter such a bad reception. Beverly Hills is sterile. It’s the lack of imagination. The lack of imagination is sinister, ominous, violent - because it is coupled with certainty and self-assuredness. with an absence of any cultural self-reflection.

But I'm going out again on Tuesday hoping, again, to prove myself wrong. I'm not just a glutton for punishment. This time I'm bringing a camera guy. I figure he'll either legitimize my presence there to the locals or at least he'll probably be able to document the experience I've been having. I'm sure it'll be a little bit of both. I'll let you know.



WEST NILE VIRUS HITS WILL ROGERS MEMORIAL PARK!

A BEVERLY HILLS PUDDLE

AN HOURS SLIP I FOUND LYING IN AN ALLEYWAY BEHIND ROWS AND ROWS OF PERSONAL TENNIS COURTS AND SWIMMING POOLS.

Comments

[Madley]

She was fun... I enjoy your walk and your interviews as I'm also getting to know my town from a different POV too!

Great work...

[Gaile]

Hang in there -- you will find some other areas where you will feel more welcome! I am enjoying your journey and hearing about it along the way.

[Jay Dedman]

some people are crazy.
here are examples.
let go of expectations.
so fra, its pretty amazing who youve met.

[Ted]

"What sanctions him to be an asshole? His job? His shirt?" I love it.