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retro-Red Dawn
Saturday, May 19 2001
I'd been over at Bathtubgirl's place last night, sleeping in the extra bedroom. This morning I went into her one bathroom, which is also her studio, to use the facilities. I was thinking, there has to be a better way than to have a studio be the only place in the apartment where someone can take a nice relaxing hangover shit.
Bathtubgirl and I walked Sophie around her part of lowland downtown Los Angeles, past endless shops catering to the bride in need of a stainless (but deliciously stainable) white wedding dress. A gaggle of German tourists dressed too lightly for the morning LA chill asked us where City Hall might be but of course we didn't know.
[REDACTED]
Bathtubgirl had told me last night that the air in downtown LA is noticeably worse than, say, West LA or Venice. This morning I could taste what she meant. The air had an insulting quality to it that you could feel in your throat. As Bathtubgirl pointed out, it was not the sort of air that you'd ever want to inhale deeply. But how could you avoid it? It was the only air available. I can't imagine having to breathe it every day, but plenty of people do. It must really shave the years off of a lifetime.
Still, people keep paying big prices to live downtown and developers are doing what they can to gentrify even the most seedy parts of the urban lowland (places that are normally only used for car chase scenes and backdrops for Death Metal videos). On the first floor of Bathtubgirl's apartment, for example, a hip café and restaurant is being built, as if in anticipation of a coming renaissance.
Later on Bathtubgirl drove me home.
On the way she admitted that she is now in love with a guy named Zero who lives in Holland and maintains a website called IWonderU.com. Evidently Zero is more her type than Snow, being considerably more intellectual and having a more-evolved sense of music (his favorite band is Guided by Voices) and art. Bathtubgirl has talked to Zero a few times on the telephone and has managed to run up a $400 phone bill. How can she be in love with a guy she has never physically met? It doesn't make sense to anyone but her. But she's taken to internet romance like a hen-raised duckling to water.
Since she hardly ever drives these days, Bathtubgirl was sort of unfamiliar with the freeways of downtown and it took a little rambling around to get oriented correctly on the 110.
John and I sat around this afternoon, uninspired by any of the movie-watching ideas that Maria and Chun had suggested. Instead we found a classic Cold War-era movie, Red Dawn (that link is hilarious), on the teevee. It's the movie where the Russians and Cubans gang up against the United States and improbably launch an invasion starting with a high school in rural Colorado. Being the assholes that every American knew the Russians to be in those days, the Reds thoroughly shot up the school and most of the students, forcing a small band of them to retreat into the Rockies. I'd originally seen this movie back in the early 80s, at the height of the Cold War, when the haircuts on the high school kids were still fashionable. It was ridiculous propaganda even back then, an obvious marketing ploy by the gun and military contract industry. What with all the anti-commie hate such a movie surely stirred up, it's a wonder there wasn't a political move made at the time to hit the Russians with nukes just because of how bad they could be.
The one thing that really stands out in this movie, though, is the people in whom it entrusts the survival of the Western world. These are the conventional high school heroes: a letter-jacket-wearing senior class president, a football quarterback, and a couple of chicks (concealed for a time in a crawl space) who might well have been cheerleaders. The dorks, brainiacs and losers, the kids who would be the heroes in a modern movie of this sort, must have all been killed along with that predictably dispensable African-American teacher at the beginning. It's amusing to think that the heroes of this film were precisely the sorts of assholes loathed by the Columbine shooters years later in this same part of the world.
All in all it wasn't an especially productive day. It was remarkable in one respect however. I managed to break a record which has stood for over two years. The last time that record was broken, it had stood for about ten years. Now my record is seven; not bad for a 33 year old man! I'm nowhere near as good as my housemate John, however; his record (so he claims) stands at 12.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?010519 feedback
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