by Will Self
So it continued, on past the XXX Sex Shops and across the intersections, the two men passing me, then stopping, panning as I went by to my departing back, then passing me once more. It reminded me of overtaking a truck with a shiny aluminium tank, then pulling in front of it, then dropping back behind, then passing it again – all this in ’94, on the Santa Ana freeway, with Polly Borland in the passenger seat, filming our reflection in the mirrored belIy of the grunting beast with a Super 8 camera. Rodney King was newly tenderized by the truncheons of the LAPD, and this was our anticipation of what became the signature CGI shot of urban destruction: the huge vehicle either laterally twisting, or – as above – turning end-over-end as it caroms along a city canyon. Why? Because, paradoxically, while the shot appears to be about the destruction of technology, it reinforces the notion that planes, trains and automobiles are like boulders tumbling down the hillside of civilization – natural and unstoppable.
I had no idea what the recordist was picking up with his fluffy loofah – wild track, I supposed. I hadn’t particularly wanted sound, but the cameraman had said on the phone I always work with Ray in such a way as to suggest it would arouse suspicion if I didn’t take them on as a unit, together with a third: a fixer-cum-gofer who I now assumed must be the clumpy-thighed girl in a hoodie who, whenever I directed my gaze away from the sidewalk, was standing in a parking lot, or beside a useless hedge footling with her BlackBerry.
I didn’t have a reservation, yet, despite it being the middle of the night for me, rejected Inn after Court after Lodge. Rejected them, although I believe I know better than most that selfconsciousness – and hence the illusion of choice – must only be a function of the time-lag between the determined action and our decision to take it. In our innermost portions, we understand this, and so are impelled to place a face on this milliseconds-long void – revere it, even. So ...
Ever the victim, I take back my twenty and pocket it, cross the oil-stained forecourt, cross another intersection, pity a jet screaming overhead, then swing into the lobby of the Uqbar Inn. The crew tumble in after me, panting. I look round from the receptionist’s bored make-up to mutter a curt ‘Cut!’ at their sweaty faces.
We sat in the lobby area on foam chunks covered in citrine nylon to discuss the following day’s filming. I explained my objective: that they should film my walk from LAX to Hollywood as a single continuous shot, at times static, at others panning, at still others tracking or zooming. The cameraman objected that the interruption of night-time, to say nothing of the gaps between set-ups, would ruin the effect: ‘You’d need a relay of goddamn camera coolies walking backwards the entire way!’ I nodded understandingly, then palmed him off with the offer of a beer – and pizza, which the trio then ate, their triangular tongues darting out to capture the wedges before tomato purée and mozzarella muck dribbled into their laps.
My map was spread out on a coffee table, and we were hammering down tomorrow’s route and deciding where exactly they should pick me up, when I realized that if all three weren’t exactly sui generis, neither were they featured players. I had, of course, forgotten the sound recordist and the gofer’s names the instant they were introduced to me; however I knew the cameraman was Jeff, so decided to term them generically ‘the Jeffs’. Jeff was curious about the project – he was English and had been based in LA for over twenty years. I reiterated the explanation I’d given him on the phone: that it was an experimental film, with Arts Council backing. But this had scarcely sounded plausible when I was sitting in the B&B in Uxbridge, and he hadn’t swallowed it.
A TV monitor in the corner of the lounge area showed the San Diego Beach Patrol moving on a homeless man who had the varnished cedar complexion and puckish features of the English screenwriter and novelist Hanif Kureshi; while a voiceover intoned: ‘The drunk’s emotions can become dangerously aroused ...’ I thought nothing much of the coincidence at the time, but rounded on Jeff: ‘You’re no Scorsese, only a dumbass who came to Tinseltown with big ideas, then ended up shooting wedding videos!’ He just sat there, disconsolately looking at his spreading paunch, and it was left to Gofer Jeff to calm me down by raising such pedestrian issues as municipal film unit permissions. This kept us occupied for ... aeons, until finally they went away. That was the trouble with film people, I ruminated as I slumped in the elevator, then limped along to my room: they applied the same basic principle to all their practices, so ended up shooting far more of the breeze than could ever be reasonably required.
What was it Busner had warned me about? I knew he had warned me about something that I might find in a hotel room, so I carried out a minute examination as soon as I’d dumped my bag, kicked off my shoes, stripped and showered. Damp and naked, I squatted to peer beneath the valance, then stretched up to see under the pelmet – but there was no sign of anything untoward, no hidden Hals or button mikes. Then I snapped on the radio and smoked for a while as I listened to the subscription drive on KPFK. Now I was standing looking at the bulbous prong of the games controller, an alien’s digit crooked over the top edge of the TV. The ergonomics of the controller were at once obvious and obscure, its yellow, red and green buttons; its twin toggles and further buttons marked with square, circular and triangular symbols.
What was it Busner had warned me about, surely not the drapes in Room 423 and their similarity to a Jewish prayer shawl? I could only imagine my occasional therapist would approve of the lengthy reverie I then plunged deep into, concerning Extended Mind Theory as it related to video games and the driving of cars – cars, which are the true superheroes of the modern era, powerful demiurges that canter across cities on their rubbery pseudo-pods. Those adverts for Citroën cars that feature innocuous hatchbacks metamorphosing – à la Transformers – into huge dancing robots express a fundamental truth: the servant has become our master. When the movie came out (the third in a series based on a toy), Anthony Lane devoted 1,000-plus words to it in the New Yorker, which, for sheer sledgehammer- ’n’ -nuttiness, were unrivalled – except, possibly, by an as yet undiscovered Montaigne essay, ‘On Flipper’.
I came to at around 5.00 a.m., still staring at the prong of the controller. During the night I had peed and the uric salts were grainy between my chafed thighs, while the pancake-thin carpeting had been soaked through, then clawed into ridges by my bare feet, which must have continued shuffling on the spot. Pre-dawn leeched the colours from the already muted institutional room. The fugue hadn’t been qualitatively different from waking consciousness, so I was still more exhausted than I had been when the fat controller grabbed me. I fell across the bed, but sleep was tantalizingly out of reach: a beautiful rose garden glimpsed through a vanishingly tiny door, and eventually I dressed and went down to breakfast, which I ate listening to three prominent neurosurgeons discuss cell phone wave shields with Larry King. Their radioactive deliberations were interspersed with the traffic report on KNBC – news that had as much purchase on me as updates on the Assyrian occupation of Babylon c. 3200 BC. Possibly less, given that the UN mandate permitting US bases to operate in Iraq would expire by the end of the year.
I fought off the urge to pick up the dinky blueberry muffin I had unthinkingly opted for and hand it to the bleary child at the next table with the words, ‘To scale with you, I believe?’ Fought it off because the child’s mother was played by Kim Basinger. Basinger, whose forehead had bulged so provocatively as Mickey Rourke slam-dunked her pelvis in 9½ Weeks (1986) – a swelling that suggested he was pumping her so full of semen there was nowhere else for it to go. She still looked pretty shiny despite being on a career-slalom on sheet ice.
The KNBC man’s face was as ancient as an Assyrian basrelief – but full face rather than in profile. He spoke of an accident on Freeway 10, his shattered visage looming between the hieroglyph of civilization and the crumpled topography of the Sierra, then dissolved into live footage of a chariot broadsided across two lanes, with CHP officers dismounted from their Harleys and taking notes on wax tablets.
Far from lifting over night, the nuages maritimes were even denser that morning, yet, despite not having slept since Uxbridge, as I left the Uqbar Inn I had a fresh spring in my step. I resolved to stay there again in the future, so delighted had I been by the pathos of its frosted floral lampshades – assuming, that is, that my incontinence would be held against Postlethwaite or Thewlis rather than me. Yes, there had been Basinger, and Hal hung above the reception desk as I paid my bill, but once I was out the door the mist was so dense that I doubt any camera could’ve registered the blur when I turned to the right – or the left.
Counter-intuitively, a grid-plan city forces more decisions on the walker than the winding folkways of an older more haphazard urbanity. Since diagonal progress can be made equally effectively by any given series of horizontal and perpendicular traverses, at each intersection the choice of two directions remains, maddeningly. No wonder I opted for one huge L, and so plodded on along Century, then turned left up Cienega, which ran beside a God-gouged gutter full of the San Diego Freeway. Within three miles the limp pennants of the medieval car dealerships and the donutmorphic drive-ins were doing my fucking head in, man. The Edenic valley of the Colne, with its pylons and reedy rills, now came before me in all its lush raiment – why had I not remained there, waiting for my Sissy Spacek, then together with her raised a tribe of feral survivalists among the alders and poplars?
The signal phasing was weighted heavily against the pedestrian, while the clearance zone at each intersection was wide enough to swallow tribes of the impious. But there was one of me to tens of thousands of the Transformers. Each wait for the stickman to shine through the nuages was a vigil – I was finely balanced between grief and joy, while Hal cloned himself from one pole to the next. Eventually, at Florence, the sidewalk gave out and I was forced into the ur-suburba. As I ascended the Baldwin Hills, it occurred to me that almost all my life had been a topiary hare’s hopeless race along silent sidewalks beside empty homes. The buttery swathes of the lawns, the oh-so-slow lava flows of the crescents and drives, the Ionic, Doric and Corinthian columns as hollow as subprime mortgages – it didn’t matter a jot if the inhabitants were white or, as here, black, suburbs were always at once pre- and post-apocalyptic. In the two-car garage the wayward Cal-Tech physicist connects a purloined cyclotron to a Barcalounger – with devastating results.
The stop lady for Highland Elementary hustled some kids – including me – across the road and I arrived at Homebase, where a score or more of Hispanic extras hung out in the parking lot to see if they’d be taken on for a day impersonating gardeners in long shot. I stopped to chat: no, they didn’t mind the stereotyping, but ‘Y’know, my friend, in this part of town ground staff are almost always whites – it’s, like, a status symbol,’ said one with Coppertone skin and a Fu Manchu goatie.
‘Yeah,’ his buddy concurred. ‘For a reactive industry Hollywood is so fuckin’ slow.’
I went on past caged-in basketball courts and reached the scrubby uplands where oil pumps rose and fell like dipping bird toys. The Jeffs were waiting for me and I conspicuously ignored them as they set up for a long shot in a lay-by. Still, I was grateful for their perfect timing: the nuages maritimes were lifting, and to the north the Los Angeles basin lay revealed: 300 square miles of eyes and camera lenses. Somewhere out there was a killer or killers and I needed the crew’s prophylaxis badly; unprotected, who knew what I might become prey to – surely only the pathetic self-consciousness of adolescence, which commences with checking for zits in wing mirrors, and culminates – ten years or yards along the road – in a screen test?
Absorbed in the steady rhythm of my paces I forgot about the Jeffs. I was walking through the Ruben Ingold County Parkway – a strip of greenery that ran along the spur above Slauson – when down in the valley, on the far side of the highway, I spotted a bum asleep on a bench. At least, I thought that’s what it was – I couldn’t be certain from this distance. There was an uncanny flatness to the static figure – besides, I knew most LA benches were bum-proofed, their seats either canted forward so it was impossible to find repose, or else segmented with hip-spearing ridges.
I turned aside from the path and plunged downhill, leaping fences and crashing through the undergrowth. Was it a man, or some weird hallucination of mine, provoked by sleeplessness? It wasn’t until I reached the verge and Escalades were whipping past the toes of my shoes that I realized it was a trompe l’œil ad for Will Smith’s latest movie, Hancock, in which, cast against type, the suave actor played a bum who also happens to be a superhero. Swept with an unreasonable rage, I glowered on Smith’s life-sized 2-D copy: the reflective shades, the stubbly jaw, the woolly hat and Hawaiian shirt. 1-800-LAw, NO WIN-NO FEE – that I could cope with, but movie ads should stick to billboards, the hopeful tombstones of dead drive-ins.
I rolled down the hills to Leimert Park, where I got a bucket of tea and stopped for a smoke by the art deco movie theatre that marks the cultural epicentre of the city’s black population. The bench I reclined on burned with a slogan for the MAALES project (Men of African American Legacy Empowering Self): ‘Bisexual, curious, or straight but fool around now and then?’ Then, like a bandsaw’s blade, I juddered my way through the Carpenter Gothic streets of Crenshaw and West Adams, which, under the guise of Sugar Hill, was the only racially desegregated neighbourhood in 1920s Los Angeles: Theda Bara, Busby Berkeley and Fatty Arbuckle had been replaced by a weeping fat boy pushing an obviously new mountain bike, whose father taunted him, ‘You can’t ride it, you’ll never ride it!’
When I came along Jefferson to the leafy environs of USC, the mission Muslim architecture gave way to postmodernist parkland. I patted myself down for sawdust and tried smiling at the coeds, but they took one look at my middle-aged white man horror mask and swerved away. There was a flyer up outside one of the halls advertising a lunchtime jam by NWPhd, and, intrigued by the sounds that were emanating – Gil Scott-Heron mixed improbably with Orlandus Lassus – I plunged inside. The Jeffs, who were still strapped up in their equipment, couldn’t follow me into that darkness, so joined Will Smith on a bench to wait.
Up on a low stage four tall African-American men were rapping; one of them was doing the Latin: ‘Hoc quicquid tandem sum, caruncula est et animula et animi principatus.’
The next the English: ‘Whatsoever I am, is either flesh, or life, or that which we commonly call the mistress and overruling part of man: reason.’
While the others picked out a word or two and scatted with it in a deep undertone, so: ‘Quicquid-quicquid-principatus-quidipatus ...’ Or: ‘What-so-what-so-what-so-reason.’
It was a commanding performance. The four were dressed conservatively in bankers’ suits, shirts and ties, their hair closecropped, and so resembled a new generation of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Their rapping was at once percussive and euphonious, plaiting the two languages together: ‘Missos fac libros: noli amplius distrahi; sed ut jam moriens carunculam contemne: cruor est ossicula et reticulum, ex nervis, venulis et arteriis contextus.’
(‘Venulus-nervis, venulus-nervis, nervulis-venis ...’)
‘Away with thy books, suffer not thy mind any more to be distracted, and carried to and fro; for it will not be; but as even now ready to die, think little of thy flesh: blood, bones, and a skin; a pretty piece of knit and twisted work, consisting of nerves, veins and arteries; think no more of it, than so.’
(‘Veins-an’ -nerves, veins-an’-nerves, neryvein-vein ...’)
I was surprised there wasn’t more of an audience for NWPhd – only a few lounging emos picking their hangnails in plastic chairs; but then, what did I know?
‘Quin etiam animam contemplare, qualis sit: spiritus, nec semper idem, sed quod singulis momentis evomitur et resorbetur.’
(‘Spiritus-singulis, spiritus-singulis ...’)
‘And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again.’
(‘One wi
nd – one life, one life – one wind ...’)
Not much, although even a moderately competent Latinist would have been able to detect the incorporation into the English translation of later interpolations.
‘Tertia igitur pars est animi principatus; ad hunc igitur animum intende: senex es; noli pati, ut ille amplius serviat, aut amplius impetu insociabili raptetur aut amplius fatum vel praesens inique ferat vel futurum horreat.’
(‘Serviat! Raptetur!’)
‘The third, is thy ruling part; and here consider; thou art an old man; suffer not that excellent part to be brought in subjection, and to become slavish: suffer it not to be drawn up and down with unreasonable and unsociable lusts and motions, as it were with wires and nerves; suffer it not any more, either to repine at anything now present, or to fear and fly anything to come, which the destiny hath appointed thee.’
‘Slavish lust! Slavish lust!’
As each of the doctoral rappers completed his line, he took up this chant, until all four were hammering it out: ‘Slavish lust! Slavish lust! Slavish lust!’ Building to panting crescendo: ‘Sla-vish luuuuuust!’
By way of applause there was a scatter of ironic finger-clicking from the stoner kids; NWPhd didn’t seem to mind. Exactly like any professional combo, they slid straight into bickering about the performance: Howie had been a beat out on Quin etiam, but – Howie rejoined – it shouldn’t be con-tern-nee but con-tem-nay.
The college kids filed out into the noonday sun. I found myself unable to leave yet too shy to approach the group. Eventually, one of them dropped off the stage and shuffled across to me, his leather soles squeaking on the woodblock floor.
