Scenes from Another World

I spent the other day walking around Downtown LA with my roommate. She's writing an article on the LA subway and the tourism possibilities therein. I lived in Downtown LA for my lost year between college and grad school, crashing on my dad's couch at the Brewery. I know my way around Downtown pretty well so I came along to navigate. The night before we talked about various ways in which we might tackle the trip; how we might balance well known monuments and attractions with more obscure delights. In mapping out the route, I realized we'd be passing pretty close to 7th and Broadway in the Jewelry district and its singularly bizarre local eatery: Clifton's Cafeteria.

Founded by a man named Clifford Clinton whose personal portmanteau lends the restaurant its name, Clifton's is the closest I have gotten to wandering into David Lynch film.

Imagine a world built in the same mode as Disneyland: 50's clean cut, white washed optimism with a stern but caring religious undertone, delighted by the endless possibilities of the human imagination. Only, instead of the expensive flagship of an entertainment empire, its a red-headed stepchild of a backwater, underfunded, unable to keep up with changing aesthetics and dilapidated. I'm sure at some point Clifton's was the place of wonder and hope it now mockingly reflects. Those days are long past, however.

What remains is a strange kind of shell. It's dilapidation is not so much haunting as pitiable. It I've been to run down amusement parks and off-brand Chuck E Cheese's where the failure of its animatronics and the general decay of its decor made the experience as eerie as a Diane Arbus photo. Clifton's real appeal however, is in the strange pathos it seems to generate. It's hollowed out interior is still remarkably earnest. And its this earnestness that makes it so very upsetting.

Supposedly modeled after the Brookdale Lodge, a family friendly vacation resort nestled deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, the interior seeks to present itself as a welcoming sylvan escape from the hectic world of wholesale jewelry just outside its doors. A poorly carved, faux-fur covered moose leers out of an awning just past the main entrance. The walls are covered in dark wood paneling, carved to look like tree trunks. A neon cross crackles atop a tiny "chapel" seemingly built into the impressive mountain rocks.

The upstairs is paneled with a series of yellowing, backlit, window-sized photos depicting the African Savannah, the Grand Canyon, Haight-Ashbury. Sitting by those lucigraphed pictures is meant to transport a diner to the faraway land it depicts. One really might be eating in the middle of the Madagascar Jungle or on Pennsylvania Avenue just down the street from the White House.

Entering the aforementioned chapel, a claustrophobic camera obscura-- too small to stand up in fully with a diorama of a woodland scene built into a glass tank set in one wall-- one can, with the push of a button hear the voice of a man long dead, with the slightest hint of a Tennessee Ernie Ford twang, read poetry praising both Jesus and the woods while canned birdsong plays, deafened by the whispering of ancient static. There's nothing sinister in the message, just the honest naivete that one could have a profound religious moment, not just by observing the majesty of the woods, but by observing its facsimile in the confines of a theme restaurant, while listening to the cheerful droning of sub par poetry being read aloud. A sign on the door cautions you to close and latch the door so that you can have more privacy in the chapel.

So it's not so much that Clifton's perverts and distorts its original intentions. It just falls magnificently short, while failing to appear hollow in the process. My mother, who first introduced me to Clifton's as a teenager, told me that her own mother used to bring her and her twin sister to the place after a day of shopping downtown. I can imagine that, in the mid 50s, as a seven or eight year old, one might be enchanted by it. But now, years past its heyday and nonetheless undaunted in its message it invokes the kind of nostalgia that is thoroughly painful: the return to a childhood favorite and realization that it would never again fulfill that same needful desire.

Clifton's was never my childhood joy. It was barely my mother's. It doesn't make me personally nostalgic. Instead it's a kind of nostalgia for the world at large. Here is a place that has fallen through the cracks of modernization. It's a portal into a world that the world has forgotten but still yearns for. It cannot fulfill the promise of its credo, but it makes one keenly aware of the lack.

Doubling Down

I promised trash culture. I deliver trash culture.

The other night, my friend and I went down to the KFC/Taco Bell near the University where I teach in order to participate in a cultural phenomenon: The Double Down.

The link I've provided here is a pretty decent explanation of the actual experience of eating it, and I would rather not paraphrase food critics more pithy and accurate than I, but I would like to talk about some of its existential horror and appeal.

My old roommate coined the term "intercourse meals" to describe food masquerading as other food. I am deeply entranced by this. Every year for my birthday I make "meatcake" a layered meatloaf glazed with Worcestershire-Ketchup and "frosted" with garlic mashed potatoes. Its surprisingly tasty if never precisely convincing as a desert. Similarly, I love making melba toasts topped with vanilla and orange creme in the shape of a fried egg. In short, I'm a sucker for visual ruses. So fried chicken pretending at bundom would seem to be right in culinary sweet spot.

On a bit of a side note, I think I can trace this obsession wit mimicry back to my dad's Time-Life nature books, one of which was devoted to clever ruses in nature. The cover showed a kind of aphid-like beastie masquerading as a thorn on a branch. It was both fascinating and terrifying. Creatures could be lurking in any everyday objects: a knot on a tree might be a spider, the broken capitol of an ionic column might be the shell of a hermit crab. It was a world that, more than deceptive, drew delightfully uneasy comparisons

In the culinary world, the gap between fried chicken and bun is not so very great as the gap between meat and cake (or stick and insect), but it nonetheless appeals to that part of me that thrives on indeterminacy. But that is ultimately my problem with the double down. Its not a real sandwich. The chicken is strangely mismatched. One would think that in this modern era of vacuu-formed meats, where McRibs can mimic the non-existent bones in their interior, that you could at least have a piece of fried chicken that resembles a bun, or at the very very rock bottom minimum resembles its sister piece so as to form a grippable, cohesive unit. The interior of this sandwich claims to be a bacon and cheese melt. Sadly it is a single piece of plastic cheese and two meager strips of bacon which would embarrass even a pauper sandwich artist. The chicken is far too thick, the interior is off center. Were it a traditional bread sandwich it would be mocked as an chaotically constructed, abstract joke on sandwichdom. It would be a DaDa sandwich, recognizable only in its obtuse mockery.

I guess what I'm driving at is that I don't need the Double Down to be a successful meal, I just need it to be a successful mimic. Content is irrelevant. Form is all. Let's gloss over the fact that the thing tasted terrible. Let us set aside that for all its weight in my hand, it was unsatisfying in my stomach. We shall not stoop to dwell on the fact that its greasy presence in my stomach gave me all manner of unsettling nightmares. It looked nothing like a sandwich.

I was promised mimicry, all I got was chicken.

The Somnambulists' Diary

Dream: 4/14/10, while napping in the early afternoon

I am having dinner with Apu and his wife from the Simpsons. I am not animated but they are. While their home is also not animated it is painted in blocks of color making everything look distorted and unreal. I have been eating a yellow curry dish served over rice.

Apu’s wife has been stirring the communal bowl with a wooden spoon over and over and buried in the curry I can see a glint of gold, for some reason the glimpses fill me with dread. She rolls up her sleeve and reaches into the pot which has suddenly become much deeper. Glutinous yellow curry oozes over the edges of the pot to join crusty dried refuse from previous meals.

Her hand emerges unscathed and she is holding a simple golden band: a wedding ring. She hands it to her husband then turns to me saying “There’s shit in this curry. You’ve been eating shit.”

A wave of nausea rushes over me and I bolt down the hall to the bathroom where I start drinking copiously from the sink faucet, trying to wash the excrement from my mouth. That’s when I start noticing grit in my mouth. I spit out what looks like grainy carbon grit and my mouth feels as though its been lined with sand.

My mouth feels like its starting to fill up with the stuff and I realize that its actually growing inside it. I begin to chew to try and break it down. I notice that there are small insect like creatures, black and mermecolic. Hundreds of them are falling out of the sink, drowning in the frothy, white water. Whatever they are, they’re in my mouth.

I spit the ground up insect into the bathtub next to me. One of them has escaped my teeth intact. I lean in to examine it. It curls up its legs and its scorpion-like stinger tail. Then it pulses, shivers and grows slightly larger. This happens several times and the insect is now the size of a lap dog, I keep having to chew, grind the infant beings into grit, horrified now that my lack of vigilance will result in one of these monsters in mouth.

Suddenly I am in my home, watching a tv report. A man who appears to be Jeff Bridges, dressed in faded, weathered khakis, like a great white hunter, is giving a report. His gray hair is drawn into a long ponytail and his face is powdered and he’s wearing big circular spots of rouge on his cheeks. He’s talking about how the city has been overrun by giant insects. The only way to kill them is to stab them through an eye with a flaming spear.

I open my door and the outside world is in tatters. Prim suburban neighborhood, SUVs in the driveway, on fire, overturned. Everywhere are giant insectoid creatures. Armored beetles mostly, massive like rhinos. Jeff Bridges voice continues, describing species as I drive around in a jeep.

At last I recognize the beast that was pouring out of my mouth from earlier. It looks nothing like it did in the bathtub. Now it’s a towering, elephantine creature with four trunk like legs, an iridescent scarab’s shell and a bony crest worthy of a brontotherium. It glances at me with one of its six eyes, which rolls back in its head with lazy annoyance. It snaps its parrot beak at me, bored.

And it dawns on me. I did this.

Beginnings are Overrated

Clearly. I've never really understood the exact role of blogging and I suppose that's because it doesn't have a particularly narrow one. I kept a regular blog through blogspot in college that was basically a space to rant. Before that I had a livejournal which was more or less a private diary that was somehow comfortably open to the public. As to what this is? Who knows.

Mostly this is a forum to write casually. Its a luxury I haven't had much in the past four years or so. My graduate program keeps me on my toes for formal writing. I'm limited by my subject matter (English) and my areas of expertise (Victorian and Gothic 19th century literature) and my academic interests (the Gothic valence of children). I suppose this blog is a liberation from that.

Don't get me wrong, I love Academia. In many ways, I prefer the formal writing to the casual: I like speaking from a place of authority; I like contributing new ideas to a community rather than rehashing the arguments of others; most of all, I like the things I write formally about. But every once in a while I get the urge to break with formality and research and expertise in order to write thoughtfully and thoroughly from a place of speculation, relative ignorance and on subjects I know little about. I suppose, in that way, this is a pretty standard blog.

But I guess its appropriate to write about the title and theme of the blog in a first entry, not that this blog has a particular theme. Harold Skimpole, in my estimation, is the greatest villain in literary history. In Dickens' novel Bleak House, he's a grown man, masquerading as an eternal child and banking off of his wit and feigned innocence to charm his way into the pockets of many innocent philanthropists. The quote that serves as my header refers to his perverse justification of his notions of charity. By being a charity case, he allows those with generous hearts an object on which to lavish their gifts.

I'm not into mooching, per se (though the budget of a grad student does make the lifestyle tempting), but I am into the perversity of his inversions. He manages to deftly reverse expectations and remain the beneficiary of his friend's naive charity with nothing more than the suggestion that his poverty isn't a state but a service.

I love low culture. Through Skimpole I see a world in which the base becomes exalted and worthy of our attention: a world where trashy TV is the window to our psyche, where fast food becomes a kind of postmodern art and where I can ramble about both with some semblance of insight. This blog is my informal, uninformed and formulaic attempt at perversely reveling in my cultural bottom-feeding. Its a blog of gilded refuse.

So please, don't show me any vulgar gratitude. I rather think you ought to be thanking me.