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\r\n\r\nWe now have, especially since\r\nReagan, have made our heroes our basically businessmen -- people who make\r\na lot of money. Whereas I think traditionally in old Chinese culture ...\r\nthe lowest people on the totem pole were the athletes and the businessmen,\r\nwhereas the highest would be the poets, the philosophers the writers and,\r\nI guess, the musicians.<\/b>\r\n<\/p> \r\n<\/p>
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AD:\r\nO.k. so maybe we could describe what's a bohemian by describing what's\r\na California bohemian.<\/b>\r\nLR:\r\nThey're artists who experiment with love and life in all its ways, ususally\r\nwith a political perspective to the left. We now have, especially since\r\nReagan, have made our heroes our basically businessmen -- people who \r\nmake a lot of money. Whereas I think traditionally in old Chinese culture\r\n... the lowest people on the totem pole were the athletes and the businessmen,\r\nwhereas the highest would be the poets, the philosophers the writers\r\nand, I guess, the musicians. I don't know much about Chinese music. \r\nWe've flip flopped that now so that, and this was the influence of Reagan, \r\nso that our great heroes are athletes, rock starts, which is music without \r\nbrains ... I mean it's glorification of commerce it's glorificcation of \r\nmaking money the glorification of bankers. The bohemian movement obviously \r\nrepresented the opposite of that because, to them, the greatest glory is\r\nthe creative person, you know whether it's writing or dancing. But\r\nthat's who bohemians are and they definitely include certain very\r\nspecific people ... you've got to include Jack London, you got to\r\ninclude really Mark Twain, you have to include Steinbeck, Robinson\r\nJeffers was kind of on sort of a bohemian even though he didn't fit\r\npolitically. But they tend to be left. <\/b>\r\n<\/p> AD:\r\nDid you have a favorite author profiled in the book? <\/b>\r\n<\/p> LR:\r\nIt changes from time to time. And also dependant on when I was doing it. \r\nLike when I wrote about Upton Sinclair, I was really enjoying that because \r\nI'd always loved Upton and I felt that I was bringing an author to people's \r\nattention. I mean, everybody knew Upton Sinclair as the author of \"The \r\nJungle.\" And they didn't realize he spent half a century in Los Angeles \r\nwriting about a lot of Los Angeles subjects. And a lot of his books were \r\nwritten in Los Angeles ... I mean, like, his book oil, which is about \r\nSouthern California entirely, and actually about Signal Hill, was maybe\r\nthe best novel ever wriiten about Southern California. It's just\r\nan incredible novel. And, probably as a piece of writing it's better\r\nthan \"The Jungle.\" ... But, then on the other hand I was pretty excited\r\nabout Bukowski. Well, now of course Bukowski I did a lot of things \r\n-- it wasn't only that night I spent drinking. I went to a couple\r\nmovie premieres where he was at and, you know, hung around different\r\ncircumstances until I was really able to spend some time with him.\r\nAnd, also having brushed across him at the L.A. Free Press, where\r\nhe really first became well known. <\/b>\r\n<\/p> AD:\r\nWhat was it like to go drinking with Bukowski? <\/b>\r\n<\/p> LR:\r\nIt was all you might have imagined. He drank, of that there was no \r\ndoubt. And he was unpredictable and enertaining as well. He's ultimately\r\na disturbing character, with his love of Celine and Sartre, two very \r\ncontradictory characters. I write about going drinking in one of the \r\nchapters in the book. <\/b>\r\n<\/p> AD:\r\nThe way his poems are written is almost in the dialogue of a street \r\ncharacter or something like that. It's not like, he's definitely not an \r\nobservor. He's almost like an actor. <\/b>\r\n<\/p> LR:\r\nHe's an active participant of the street life. <\/b>\r\n<\/p> AD:\r\nSo, is that a uniquely Los Angeles way to appoach the literature? <\/b>\r\n<\/p> LR:\r\nThat I'm not quite sure about and, in actual fact, Bukowski is probably \r\na lot more European than anything and that's why they loved his stuff there. \r\nBut I guess the big thing that Bukowski gets is the sense of alienation\r\nthat a Los Angeles creates. Like Gene Vier ... the one who hooked\r\nme up with Bukowski, felt that what he really got was -- you know\r\nin Europe even somebody on the street has a sense of belonging. Because\r\nof some basic structures that will keep them going and so on. Here\r\nwhen we throw people out they're dead, they're gone, the're cut off,\r\nthey don't exist anymore. We have no sense of we. We have no sense\r\nof, you know, everybody belongs in some sense. So what you get with\r\nBukowski is that incredible sense of alienation. And that might be\r\nparticularly Los Angeles because I think Los Angeles is even stronger\r\nin that than other American places, you know it's the Darwinian survival\r\nof the fittest kind of thing, which we have really incorperated into\r\nour ethic, into our way of being as Americans, and it's just capitalism\r\nrun totally amuck.<\/b>\r\n
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<\/b>\r\nThe hippy use of drugs was typically\r\nrelated to folklore. I mean everyone knew about peyote and how and why\r\nthat was used, as well as magic mushrooms. LSD was synthesized, so it was\r\ndifferent -- but the hippy drug thing, through Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley,\r\ndefinitely had strong mythic connections.<\/b>\r\n<\/p> \r\n<\/p>
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AD:\r\nIn Oscar Zeta Acosta's \"Autobiographical Essay,\" he writes: \"Most of the \r\nbig ideas I've gotten for my lawyer work have usually come when I was \r\nstoned... I think the acid experience is part and parcel of the radical \r\nChicano Movement.\" In your review of Zeta-Acosta's work, you briefly talk \r\nabout the drug aspect of the movement he was involved in, but you kind\r\nof relate it to the broader culture of the 1960s. I tend to disagree,\r\nI think the use of drugs described in revolt of the Cockroach People\r\nwas more related to the use of drugs by certain Southwest indigenous\r\npeoples that the Chincano movement took their inspiration from. It\r\nhad a historical antecedant in a way the hippie movement's use of\r\ndrugs did not. <\/b>\r\nLR:\r\nBut actually the hippy use of drugs was typically related to folklore.\r\nI mean everyone knew about peyote and how and why that was used,\r\nas well as magic mushrooms. LSD was synthesized, so it was different\r\n-- but the hippy drug thing, through Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley,\r\ndefinitely had strong mythic connections. <\/b>\r\n<\/p> AD:\r\nWhat do you think specifically about the use of drugs described in \r\nZeta-Acosta's books and what do you think of the use of drugs during the\r\n60s generally. Do you think it helped the anti-war movement or do\r\nyou think it sort of derailed the movement? <\/b>\r\n<\/p> LR:\r\nWell, there are different components. Marijuana had always been the \r\nunderground drug, especially in black culture. And it turns out it was \r\nwidely used as an asthma fighter, at the turn of the century. Drugs were \r\nalways there -- the original coke was just that. Coke Coleridge in \"A \r\nStately Pleasure Dome,\" well that's very much opium. \"Alice in Wonderland\" \r\nwas cocaine, I think, and maybe some opium. But specifically in the case\r\nof the Beats, pot was the drug of choice because a lot of it was\r\nbased on a reverance for black culture -- especially in music and\r\nalso in writing. There's some evidence that LSD was more intentional.\r\nHenry Luce [founder of Time Magazine] really did push people using\r\nLSD, which was sort of created or conceived of as a way of disorienting\r\nthe enemy. I have often wondered it was used in that manner in the\r\n'60s because a lot of people did get permanently messed up using\r\nLSD -- and I say that as one who used some LSD in the '60s and while\r\nI got negative about it, I think it did help me achieve a certain\r\ncreativity in my writing that I wouldn't have had without it. <\/b>\r\n<\/p> AD:\r\nIn the book, you describe some of the parallels between Zeta-Acosta's \r\nwork and Malcolm Lowry's \"Under the Volcano.\" Why is this? Do you think\r\nthey were both similar because they were revolutionary novels? <\/b>\r\n<\/p> LR:\r\nThere are strong similarities but strong differences dictated by the \r\ntimes. Acosta is writing about the '60s when, in fact, politics was messed \r\nup a lot by mystical nonsense, some of it drug induced. In both novels, \r\nthere is this strong undercurrent of silent fascism coming of age. Lowry\r\nis writing about Spain and its Civil War, and then Hitler taking\r\nover in the form of Franco -- which was reverberating in Mexican\r\npolitics of the time as well. Acosta is writing about \"direct\r\naction\" -- anarchist reactions -- to what was going on in the '60s.\r\nI'm not sure I would call either one of them 'revolutionary' novels,\r\nexactly, but they have those elements, certainly. But they reflect \r\nradical thinking, in two different times. Remember, Lowry was a cabalist,\r\na mystic, but he lost some of his best friends in Spain -- you know,\r\nthat was the struggle that had all the good songs but lost the war\r\n-- sort of like the Wobblies in American labor history. <\/b>\r\n<\/p> AD:\r\nWhat was your worst experience as a police reporter? ... What do you \r\nthink about the fact the Parker Center press room is completely empty now, \r\nthat there used to be a lot of reporters there and is there a change in\r\nthe way the press has covered the police in recent years? <\/b>\r\n<\/p> LR:\r\nYeah the press room used to be -- and it looked just like that. I know \r\nNielson Hemmerall, who lived through the press room, used to be in City \r\nHall, the basement of City Hall. And when he saw that movie \"L.A. \r\nConfidential,\" he loved it because it took him right back to that time\r\nand he remembered it very well. But I guess when Parker Center was\r\nbuilt it sort of moved the press room over lock, stock and barrell.\r\nBut there used to be a lot of people in it. Nowadays of course it's\r\nprimarily City News, which is there 24 hours a day and everybody's\r\nsaving money. But that means of course you don't have as many eyes\r\nlooking at things and you have to rely more on the official version\r\nand you have to pretty much take what cops hand out, because who\r\nelse are you talking to? You're not talking to the people that were\r\narrested, you don't have the manpower to go out and do those things. \r\nBut that's just American journalism has become cruddier and cruddier \r\n--dramatically so. And I think that pretty much coincides with the \r\nmonopolization of the press which has been going on the last decade or\r\ntwo. <\/b>\r\n<\/p> AD:\r\nSo it's not a coincidence? <\/b>\r\n<\/p> LR:\r\nOh, of course not. <\/b>\r\n<\/p> AD:\r\nWhat was Huxley's state of mind when he was writing \"Ape & Essence?\" \r\nMeaning was he out of cash, angry at the world, what do you think was going \r\non in his mind? <\/b>\r\n<\/p> LR:\r\nHuxley was broke when he wrote \"Ape & Essence,\" only because he couldn't \r\nget royalties out of England during the war. But I think he, like a lot\r\nof others, was very concerned about Hiroshima and the implications\r\nof that. That was the main thing that bugged him. That's what was\r\ngoing on in his mind -- what does all this death and destruction\r\nsignify? <\/b>\r\n<\/p> AD:\r\nIt's basically another Los Angeles disaster book, like Nathanael West's \r\n\"Day of the Locusts.\" What is it about Los Angeles that spawns all these \r\ndisaster novels? <\/b>\r\n<\/p> LR:\r\nIt would have to be one of the first disaster books. Remember, Nathanael \r\nWest came later, I think. West did highly influence Joseph Heller and \"Catch \r\n22.\" West was a kind of Jewish alienation from things, which Huxley, the \r\nproper Englishman, didn't have. You could look at Thomas Mann's \"Doctor \r\nFaustus\" and Malcolm Lowry's \"Under the Volcano,\" both of which were, at \r\nleast partly, written in L.A. and say they are disaster novels. But these \r\nweren't disaster novels in the sense of a silly Hollywood movie. They were \r\ntalking about alienation and the human condition. L.A. was sometimes a\r\ngood place for such novels to play out, or get written in, because\r\nL.A. spawned a certain kind of alienation, what with its surrealistic\r\nlandscape (a desert next to an ocean, etc.) But in a larger sense,\r\nthe alienation came from World War II and it affected a whole world.\r\nWorld War II was kind of like a cliff where the road runner goes\r\nover the cliff but just keeps pedaling and doesn't fall until he\r\nrealizes what has happened. L.A. is a place where people keep pedaling\r\nand don't realize the bottom has fallen out and there might not be\r\nmuch of a future. <\/b>\r\n<\/p> AD:\r\nWhat do you think is the future of Los Angeles literature? <\/b>\r\n<\/p> LR:\r\nDepends on the future of L.A. itself and the whole society. As the \r\nculture has gone into a great decline, sort of a corrupt Roman Circus \r\naffair, writing has suffered. People tell me that the great writing is\r\nnow being done in Latin America. America once produced great writers\r\n-- both Russia and America produced the great writers. I don't think\r\nthat's true right now. The question of writers out of LA is really\r\nonly a part of the larger question of where do we as a city and a\r\nnation go from here. <\/b><\/p><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/table>\r\n<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/table>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\n","contact":"","link":"","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/html","summary":"The intersection of the arts and politicts has a rich history in LA, and there's no better person to illuminate that history than author and journalist Lionel Rolfe. His book, Literary L.A., is just out in a revised and expanded third edition. Rolfe will be at Skylight Books for a book signing on Feb. 3 at 4 p.m., 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Feliz. He was interviewed for IMC-LA by Alexander Dobuzinskis.","numcomment":0,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/2002\/01\/fatman.htm","filesize":"23.9 kibibytes","article_url":"\/news\/2002\/01\/14423.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[]} | | |