British Chums

In October, my former band mate and fellow life soloist Lucy alerted me to the existence of an on-line dating site that had the allure of an inbuilt screen against right wing loony romeos. This site hung off a highly respected and internationally distributed left-leaning paper based in the U.K. Unlike other swollen heterosexual strip-mall on-line dating sites, this dating service – lets call it British Chums – promised a skinnier, boutique constituency of well educated, socially progressive lonely hearts drawn from the paper’s readership. Although my past skirmishes with the on-line dating world had yielded nothing but disaster, I shook off my Higher Wisdom who clung to my ankle pleading ‘No, no, NO! Don’t do this AGAIN!’. And I did it again. I signed up.

The three and a half readers that regularly follow this blog might legitimately intrude into my stream of consciousness now and ask ‘What happened to Chris?’

What indeed. As I outlined in a blog about a year ago, the reasons for international ‘90s hearthrob Chris Isaak marrying me were so compelling as to make the event virtually a fait accompli. But since then, Chris has simply dithered and avoided popping the question, despite having the opportunity to do so every time he logged on. And while Chris procrastinated, in September last year, Lucinda Williams stole my idea and married her fiancee/ manager Tom Overby on stage at a club in Minneapolis. After that happened, I’m afraid the thrill was gone and I’ve moved on from Chris – despite the fact that Chris’s album Mr Lucky was one of the best releases of 2009.

A Tragical Historie

My first attempt at finding love on-line was in 2006. It had been many months after my last long-term relationship had been stubbed out, but still I hesitated. All my single buddies had long ago rolled up their sleeves and waded into the digital dating fray. So why was I still shifting from foot to foot on the side-lines, what was my problem? It doesn’t take long for looks of sympathy to turn to mild exasperation. Don’t wallow, DO something. And when a psychologist friend challenged “What? Are you too proud to join a dating site?” I felt my dark secret had been flushed out. I signed up.

My Higher Wisdom even then was murmuring ‘No. NO!’ But I didn’t recognise it – in the same way that Shakespearean lovers don’t recognize their beloved if they happen to cross-dress and lower their voice.

At first, my on-line presence on Australia’s biggest on-line dating site – lets call it Horny Toads – was a mood booster. Very quickly, I was being sent ‘kisses’ – the little non-verbal tongues that Horny Toads encourages you to shoot out to profiles you fancy. I was also reaping hits – lots of hits – from guys clicking through to my profile – as they rapidly grazed the rich pasturelands of lonely ladies that rolled out for pages and pages before them.

But when I clicked back to my kissers/ grazer’s profiles to get better acquainted, my mood shifted.

There were flocks of Mr ‘Half A Girlfriend’ s. Guys who, despite a half a lifetime of bodily incarnation, still only had one photograph of themselves, and that included their last girlfriend whose hand, or sometimes half a head, could be seen clearly wedged onto their shoulders, the full loving (or drunken) embrace cropped out by Photoshop.

There were Mr ‘Popular’s, who decided the best way to attract a new mate was to show themselves at parties surrounded by loads of their female friends waving cocktails and red eyes into camera flashes, having the most hilarious flirty and fun time imaginable.

There were Mr ‘Spleen’s – guys whose profiles were thinly veiled diatribes against their exs and/or recent dates. Their ‘ideal mate’ descriptions were not so much pleas for love and understanding as ultimatums. “I’m not interested in women who just want to play games.” “My ex was one dimensional. I’m looking for someone with more depth. Ego-maniacs need not apply.”

And there was the exclusive club of Mr ‘Good Catch’ where the guys were conventionally good looking, knew how to write and had steady, well paid, secure jobs handling snakes at the local zoo or selling time-share condos at Byron Bay.

It didn’t take long for the flower of my romantic hopefulness to droop.

Meanwhile, the Victorian State elections were approaching, and I was campaigning for the Green party. Given the imperative of pushing environmental sustainability issues onto the political agenda, I began to feel the time I spent on-line chasing my romantic dreams, around and around like a frozen pea on a plate, was a waste of precious time. Still, the morning ritual of checking my ‘hits’ and perving at guys’s profiles was still triggering some kind of hope neurotransmitter, and it had encoded my right temporal lobe with something like a pleasure response. I found logging onto Horny Toads hard to give up.

Then I hit upon a solution. I would turn my Horny Toads profile into an environmental issues blog. That way, the dozens of hits I got every day – while a waste of everyone’s time romantically speaking – would at least have the benefit of highlighting salient points on water catchment preservation and old growth logging.

So I scrapped my half-earnest, half-blustering self-descriptions and started blogging about environmental issues, updating my profile every day with a new chatty ‘factual’ about why voting Green was a good idea. Hits continued at the same strapping pace, and I thought I’d achieved a good compromise between laying out love bait and political engagement.

At about the same time, however, I clicked my way into a terrible discovery; following the algorithmic beckoning of ‘matching’ criteria, I suddenly found myself staring at the photo of my ex’s brother, M.

This shocking close encounter of the digital kind brought up all kinds of abreactions. If I’m staring incredulously at M, then M could be staring incredulously at me. But worse – much worse – J, M’s brother, my ex – could easily be staring incredulously at both of us – without even subjecting himself to the leveling experience of being a member of Horny Toads. Profiles were public, as public as celebrity addictions and horse racing guides. I hadn’t fully realized just how much I had stuck a ‘for sale’ sign on my face and plopped it in the window of the World Wide Web. I was but a sausage on display, vying to stand out from the thousands of other romantically challenged sausages, nuancing the key criteria of visual attractiveness, youth and mouth-feel.

But before I could de-program my brain from its morning addiction and remove myself from display, Horny Toads did this for me. After about a week of Green blogging, I gripped my mouse one morning and pincered it onto my home page only to be splashed in the eyes with the message that my account had been suspended. No email explaining why. Just the bars across my profile page screaming KEEP OUT. I groped around the Horny Toads website to find their membership policies, slurping my coffee with a mixture of agitation and relief. I found that they reserved the right to cancel your account if they thought you were using your profile ‘inappropriately’. Clearly, having strong environmental views was inappropriate.

I splattered my fingers over the keyboard firing off a red hot angry email to the accounts department. Then I sat back and breathed heavily. Then I did a high five with my Higher Wisdom. She was grinning and barely restraining herself from blurting out ‘I told you so!” And my ‘pride problem’ also got a bronze medallion: I am, to this day, the only girl I know to have been expelled from an on-line dating site.

On Not Learning From Past Mistakes

Its February 2010, and I am leaning back on Aaron and Lisa’s couch in East Melbourne. We are lined up in a row with plates of Lisa’s luscious zucchini pasta on our laps, zoned out on cable TV.

A phrase unspools across the stretchy big home theater plasma screen, underscored by a warmly modulated American male voice:

‘eHarmony. Two percent of all couples who married last year met on eHarmony!’

Then a montage of happy American couples smiling, pawing at each other, squirts across the screen.

After a few minutes, Lisa gets up and starts rummaging through the side cabinet for the latest episode of The Wire. The brilliant Baltimore crime verite drama is our target entertainment for the evening.

As Aaron pushes off the couch, then leans over to collect the dirty dishes and wine glasses from the lounge room floor, I venture:

“So. That means. Ninety-eight percent of Americans who find their true loves and marry them, DON’T use eHarmony.”

“Apparently. They appear to be proud of that fact.”

“Isn’t that anti-advertising? I mean, what kind of moron would join an on-line dating site on the basis of a 2% chance of success?”

Back in Pittsburgh, four months later, its midnight and I am leaning over my lap-top and punching my credit card details into eHarmony.

Or your money back

On sheer impulse. With the attitude – what harm is there? My Higher Wisdom was temporarily absent – possibly in the kitchen fixing a midnight snack. When she got back, she was furious but it was too late. I was already half-way through the personality questionnaire.

An hour later, I was still clicking through the questionnaire, which seemed inordinately long and detailed. I paid less and less attention to what I clicked, I just wanted to get to the end so I could then be admitted into the eHarmony relationships supermarket and rummage through shelf after shelf of guys’ profiles.

But when I finally got to the end, I was told to wait while the love bot went off and looked for my compatible dates. After a few seconds, it came back and told me there weren’t any. eHarmony’s algorithm had apparently shuffled through millions of profiles across the world and had not found a single guy who would want to buy me a drink. I was, literally, ‘matchless’.

I tried in vain to find a way to nose through profiles so I could decide for myself, but it was only then I realised that eHarmony didn’t work that way. The only way you can meet other lonely hearts on eHarmony is via an introduction from the love bot. And the love bot had apparently decided I was way too freaky to make anyone’s digital acquaintance.

As the morning sun started to peel back the gloom in my studio, I started to fret. Had I accidentally ticked the box that asked “Do you like to murder pets?”. Or had the personality test really uncovered my inner Frankenstein?

It was then that I executed my first rational act in several hours – I did some research on eHarmony. I discovered I was not alone in my weirdohood. According to the Wiki entry, about one in five people who join eHarmony don’t get matched – not a statistic that can be found anywhere on their website. Worse still, I discovered the corporation was founded by Neil Clark Warren who was an “evangelical Christian with strong ties to the conservative Christian movement in the USA.”

That did it for me. I was on the phone to their accounts department, demanding my money back. Luckily, there is a grace period of three days where you can get a full membership refund if you come to your senses in time. As I hung up, I ruefully acknowledged my Higher Wisdom was right again, and I would never again hose time and emotional energy down the on-line dating drain.

A polyester and wool blend being

Until October, when I joined British Chums.

At first glance, the world of British Chums seemed civilized. Profiles lacked spelling mistakes. People worked at universities, in overseas aid organizations or in graphic design. Photos were, on the whole, free of severed female limbs.

Admittedly, most of the profiles revealed the sheer torment the British feel at self-revelation: “Ok, what should I write here…everyone is so much better at it than me…” But quite a few of them were great pieces of dead pan humor writing – deliberately funny rather than unintentionally so – like the thirty something artist who filled his profile with a detailed description of his obsession with picture framing, as if it was the most desirable quality a man could possess.

I was not trampled with the same digital traffic that I experienced on Horny Toads. But a few guys became my ‘fan’. Being a ‘fan’ was the equivalent of the Horny Toad kiss – an icon that lets you know the other party is interested. Finally, I decided to respond to one of my ‘fans’ by sending a message. But a few days passed and I heard nothing back. Thats odd, I thought. Why would you indicate you are interested in someone and then ignore them? I tried again with a few other gents over a couple of weeks, but the same eerie silence ensued.

Finally, one would-be match sent me an email – and in the header he said “I haven’t subscribed so I can’t email you.” Then the penny dropped: all these guys are too cheap to pay for membership and gain access to emailing and other services that the ‘sign up for free’ option doesn’t give you. They might want to meet Ms Right and experience the ultimate bliss of true love and lifelong companionship, but not if it costs them thirty quid.

At this revelation, something inside me snapped.

I deleted the carefully selected, flattering photographs I had loaded up into my gallery. In their place, I uploaded these:

I deleted my fussed-over, sincere self-advertisement. I changed my on-line name to Totally Fabricated.

Then I rewrote my profile thus:

“I am a sock puppet who sometimes dresses up as a human female. For a polyester and wool blend being, I have a complex personality. I am very rewarding if sometimes alarming company.

When I am feeling sensible and positive, I am cream colored, wear white pom poms on both ears, and have a sweet engaging expression. My favorite bands then are Saint Etienne and Swedish pop in general.

When I have had two Mick Jaggers and a line of cheap whiz, whoaa – watch out! I turn bright pink, my hair turns into a spray of tinsel and boy do I like to party. My favorite bands then aren’t bands at all but DJs playing deep house and electro megamixes at cool clubs until 6.am.

If you think you’d like a challenge in your life, with a girl who is, deep down, just a bit of nicely textured fabric, then lets talk.

I’m looking for another sock puppet to share my life with. I’m open-minded – I’m happy to meet glove puppets and finger puppets too.”

I have no idea what a “Mick Jagger” is, but this is a line out of one of my favorite episodes from The Mighty Boosh , British television’s most exquisitely formed comedy artwork. I was very pleased to have an opportunity to use this beautiful phrase, despite the fact that its delightfulness was probably lost on the stingy poms checking out my profile.

I left the profile up for a few days, half wondering if British Chums would boot me off for my ‘inappropriate’ photographs, thus making me probably the only person in the whole world to have been expelled from an on-line dating site twice. In that eventuality, I would of course need to immediately notify the Guinness book of records. But before my sock puppet freedom of speech could be curtailed by tut-tutting British love bots, I canceled my account, even though I still had two months left on my membership.

You’d think we might now have reached a sad ending. Years of sporadic attempts at finding true love on-line leading only to debacle and increased credit card debt. A jilted bride still. But thanks to British Chums, I am in fact, far richer in companionship that I ever have been. I now have two constant friends on hand (literally) – Sensible Carol and Crystal Meth – who don’t find me weird at all, laugh at all my jokes and demand nothing in return except that I sometimes sew their eyes back on.

I am heading to London next week, and will be taking Carol and Crystal with me. And if, on New Years’ Eve, we can acquire two Mick Jaggers and a line of cheap whiz, we will scream “Happy New Year!” as we run at the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and care not a whit about the trials of the single life.

America votes

“They accuse us of discrimination. Of being against the poor, of being racist. But I say the real problem is ‘soft’ discrimination. Giving welfare, hand-outs to the poor. That’s soft discrimination!”

Virginian Christian radio announcer and GOP supporter, Nov 2.

My car radio broadcast that comment, as well many other similar sentiments, as I drove through rural Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina for two weeks at the end of October. I set off on a music road trip with an old band mate with the objective of seeing as much live music native to American soil as we could for two weeks. It was my intention to devote my next blog post to an account of that trip, which I will also be turning into a very short (humorous) film next year. That will happen, this is just a quick comment on why I feel depressed when I contemplate the current political climate here in the States, but why my mood immediately springs up like a lightly touched lemon merengue pie whenever I think of whats happening in Australia.

Since November 2, the US House of Representatives has swung back to Republican control in a decisive protest vote against the Obama administration. The two major reasons cited are the issues that have dominated American domestic politics for the last 3 years: the Great Recession including 10% unemployment; as well as discontent over the passage of Obama’s healthcare legislation. Can Americans vote for the same party that bankrupted the country in the first place and have no policies to replace those that presided over the economy’s annihilation? Yes we can! Can we lash out against Obama for forcing through healthcare legislation that was heavily compromised by trying to win over GOP support in the first place – including the ditching of the popular publicly funded health insurance option? Yes we can!

Analysts are also blaming the relatively low turn-out of younger voters, compared to the 2008 Presidential elections. Whatever the reason, the mood here amongst progressive/ liberal types is very low. No cheer-ups are to be found on the environmental front; the failure to pass any climate change legislation and cap carbon emissions is the single most important reason Americans should have voted against the Dems. A recent article in The New Yorker about the
climate bill failure gives a chilling look at how deals are done in Washington nowadays, and casts the administration as lacking vision, intregrity and political strategy. Its hard not to see the President as failing to use his executive powers and the status of his office to achieve more of the things not just progressive Americans but the rest of the world desperately hopes to see happen: an opinion argued cogently by a report from the Center for American Progress.

But how can a nation that allows 54% of income tax to be spent on military and war related expenses turn its crippling fiscal debt around to invest seriously in publicly provided healthcare and economic restructuring towards a green economy? Obama’s debt reduction commission is considering a number of proposals including freezing the Pentagon’s $700 billion annual budget for the next five years. But plans to cut social security benefits and pensions are also being pushed by the GOP. Thanks to the efforts of right wing Christian conservatives like the radio announcer quoted above, who culturally dominate large tracts of rural and small town America, the promised land may yet be able to free itself from the sin of “soft discrimination.”

The Rise of the “Tree Hugging Late Sippers”

But perhaps the greatest sadness for a country that prides itself as the birthplace of democracy is that the first past the post voting system which is in use here does not give people opportunities to vote for minor parties and see them gain representation in parliament. Australia’s preferential voting system, in contrast, does, and it has been crucial in enabling the rise and rise of the Green party over the last decade. I did an interview with a Green party leader and old mate when I was in Australia earlier this year, and Mike provides a good explanation of our voting system and the political shifts in Oz politics that have led to the rise of the Greens.

In the recent Federal election in Australia, we witnessed the unprecedented spectacle of a one term Federal government almost lose its grip on power – this, after the economy experienced only the smallest of downturns while the GFC decimated many other countries. A hung parliament has been the result, with votes by four independents, including a Green and a former Green, critical to enabling the Gillard led Australian Labor Party government to cling to office – with concessions to Green policies. And in the Senate, the outcome was even more positive: Greens gained even more ground, gaining a record 7 seats and now holding the balance of power in the upper house.

The Victorian State elections will occur on 27 November, and once again there are expectations that the Greens will not only increase representation in the upper house, but could take one or more lower house seats – this despite the fact that the Victorian Liberals (the equivalent of the Republicans) have announced they will direct preferences to their supposed foes (the ALP). The Green party is increasingly seen as the voice of progressive Australia, and the only party that understands the seriousness of the local and global environmental crisis.

Its hard for me to sit on my highway-food enhanced butt here in chilly Pittsburgh, so far away from where all the spring action is in the lead up to the Victorian State election. My experience of campaigning for the Greens – while not immune to the frustrations of internal party politics – has always been, nevertheless, a lot of fun. Some of my happiest Melbourne memories are simply wandering around flat middle suburban streets, sun beating down on brick veneer bungalows and peeling iron fences, shoving Greens info sheets into the letterboxes of various shapes and reachability (you can tell a lot about a household I think by the character and location of their letterbox, as well the dogs and sprinkler systems), as well as chatting to people, and handing out how to votes on election day. I wish I could be in Melbourne on election night, to drink way too much beer at an old Brunswick pub and watch the election results on the tele, sharing the emotional rollercoaster of hope, fear and chips with local branch members.

But thanks to the internet now being on computers, I can watch the campaigning frolics from a distance and admire the increasing wit and stylishness of the Victorian Green’s social media marketing. So the least I can do is share this latest charming and funny video, which is trying to counter the frequent misinformation and smears against the Greens spread by major parties every election, and ask everyone to help it go viral. Go Greens!

Science fiction

My Brisbane school mates and I spent our tweenage years crimping our hair, slathering on make-up and trying to pass for drinking age to get into outer suburban discos. At around the same time, Eric Zala and his friends were spending their Mississippi tweenage years making a blockbuster movie in their backyards.

I realized just how unproductive my pre-20s years really were when I met Eric at the Performing Arts Exchange (PAE) Conference in Pittsburgh last week. PAE is a performing arts trades fair, similar to the Midwest Arts conference in Indianapolis which I had attended a couple of weeks ago, except PAE attendees are primarily drawn from the Mid-Atlantic and Southern states. Once again I was grasping hands at ‘minglers’ and perched like a hawk in my little marketplace booth, trying to sell Squonk Opera‘s oblique, non-narrative but spectacular music shows to theatre presenters across the USA.

At the opening party, I was standing on the balcony at the PNC stadium – the gleaming home to Pittsburgh’s much loved but generally luckless baseball team The Pirates – gnawing on some fried chicken, when a youthful, bright eyed guy with a blue name tag stood next to me. Like the world of a cheap sci-fi movie, the population of performing arts conferences are divided into elite and subordinate sub-populations which can be instantly told apart by color coded costuming. Presenters are the elite, they are the beings that control the planet’s resources, wield absolute power and wear blue name tags. The subordinates are artists and artists’ agents who wear yellow name tags. The yellows outnumber the blues by something like eight to one, and spend the whole conference trying to win their favor. Needless to say, the blues have a pretty good time.

Eric introduced himself as a presenter from a theatre in Mississippi, and told me this was his first performing arts trade show.

“You’ll find that everyone wants to be your friend” I said.

“I’ve noticed that already ” he replied. “I feel like the prettiest girl at the party.”

After the obligatory observance of blue/yellow communications protocol – I recited my Squonk Opera pitch, and Eric recited his theater’s capacity and the typical acts he booked for a season – the conversation suddenly took an interesting turn.

“Actually, this is a pretty new job for me. What I really like to do is make films.”

“Oh wow! What kind of films?”

“Well. ” Eric paused and looked a little awkward. “Well. This is kind of hard to explain, but I started off by doing a shot by shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I started it when I was twelve and finished it seven years later.”

Right at this point, my view of Eric’s head was blocked by another head, that of another yellow who had spied the blue name tag and had inserted herself between myself and Eric. Yellows generally pay little attention to each other, and sometimes faces display outright disappointment when they realize they have accidently sat next to one of their own species at the conference luncheons. The lady from a regional ballet company started in hard on the chit chat, and after a while, I excused myself but mouthed to Eric as I left:

“I really want to hear the end of that story.”

He smiled and promised to drop by my booth sometime over the next couple of days.

Deja-vu

To quote a beautiful tautology I heard the other day, my days at the booth were “de-ja vu all over again”. Just as at Midwest Arts, the Squonk display was bumped up next to that of an agency specializing in tribute bands, one of many agencies at the conference in this line of business. Producers Inc’s banners included images of a Prince tribute show called Purple Reign, a bunch of guys with flannel shirts and long hair called Marrakesh Express: A Tribute to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and ZoSo: The Led Zeppelin Experience.

The Producers Inc guy, Steve, was particularly hyped about ZoSo. Several times a day, I heard him pitch the show to interested presenters:

“I tell you, they are amazing, they are just as good as the real thing. They sound exactly like them and they even look exactly like them. Crowds go wild, especially the girls! And we’re only talking $5-$7k.”

On the second day, Steve and I got around to introductions, and I asked if ZoSo’s showcase the night before had gone well.

“Oh great, great!” he said. “You know I really love those guys. Led Zeppelin, its my generation’s music you know.”

I said: “You know, Robert Plant has a new album out.”

Steve frowned. “Who?”

“Robert Plant” I repeated. “He was in New York recently promoting his new album”

Assuming that Steve did know who Robert Plant was, his professed love of the Zep’s music did not make him curious about what the creators of that music were up to nowadays, and he changed the subject. I wondered later if Steve might even be a bit wary: if bits of the old Led Zeppelin are still surfacing all these years later, might they potentially threaten the livelihood of the new ones?

The hours in my nook clocked over slowly, with few visitations from the blues. Sunlight spun down through the enormous glass panels of the roof onto the empty center of the market floor. I would intermittently get up from my folding chair and walk slowly out into the empty light triangle. Then I would wander around in a small circle for a few minutes, enjoying my muscle movements like a bird temporarily released from its cage. I stared at the hundreds of artists’ and agents’ booths weaved around the edges of the floor like a tangle of lurid nests. Then it was time to go back to my nest, and, feeling more like a cuckoo than a hawk, try my best to incubate the hopes of my talented employers.

Life rights

On Friday night, the Squonkers were performing showcases of their latest show at CAPA, a venue down the street from the David Lawrence convention center where the PAE conference was being held. During intermission, I was once again busy grinning and collecting business cards from the blues, when I turned around and there to my delight was Eric.

“Ah! The Raiders guy!” I said

“Ah! The Squonk girl!” he replied.

And then I got to hear the rest of the story.

In 1982, Eric and his two best friends were so profoundly affected by Spielberg’s stupendously lavish adventure flick, they decided they wanted to “inhabit that world”. Where most kids would do this by buying movie merchandising – wearing the T-shirt, playing with the action figures (a revenue source virtually invented by Spielberg and upon which the Hollywood movie economy has become, with each passing decade, ever more dependent) – they decided they would rather recreate and star in their own version of the movie. Their equipment consisted of a beta-max video cam. Their shoot location was their hometown of Ocean Springs Mississippi, in their backyards and township surrounds. Most of the interior scenes were shot in Eric’s Mom’s house and basement. All special effects, props and stunts were homemade and improvised, some with hazardous consequences – Eric’s head was embedded with plaster during the scene where Belloq’s head explodes. Continuity suffered as puberty intervened and the casts’ body shape and voice tone shifted from scene to scene.

But no matter. By the time they reached twenty, they had completed their no budget, slavishly faithful shot by shot homage to the twenty three million dollar epic. They enjoyed a brief moment of glory by screening Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation at their local cinema. Then they took their tapes home, forgot about them and embarked on adulthood.

But by 2003, a “copy of a copy of a copy” of one of those tapes had somehow landed in the hands of a filmmaker who knew Spielberg. Not long after that, a letter from the movie mogul himself arrived addressed to Eric, praising his achievements as a filmmaker.

“As you can imagine, I found it very hard to believe that this letter was for real” Eric explained.

But when Eric and his fellow schoolie filmmakers then found themselves invited to show their film at film festivals around the country, make appearances on national television, and then invited to Hollywood to sign over their “life rights” for a bioflick , it was clear that their oversized boyhood fantasy was about to become reality all over again. This time however, it was happening in reverse – they were the stars, and a bunch of kids were going to have to pretend to be them.

“But what are you going to do now, in terms of your own filmmaking?” I asked. “When you’ve reproduced a Hollywood epic by the time you are twenty, where do you go from there?”

“Good question!” Eric replied.

But before he could answer, I had to excuse myself and run back in the theatre. I had to scramble up on stage and, in front of a motley crew of presenter faces – skeptical, friendly, bored, curious – introduce the third Squonk performance for the night. And by the time that was over, when I pulled on my coat and made my way out into the foyer, Dr Belloq had disappeared into the night.

You’ve never seen anything like it

The agent at the booth to the right of me was doing brisk business. Behind him was a plastic banner displaying a photo montage of musicians heavily jowled, paunched, but still throwing their silver hair around under purple stage lights: Eric Burdon and The Animals, Foghart, Joan Jett, Mickey Dolenz (from The Monkees), Paul Revere and the Raiders, Chubby Checker, The Ides of March to name only those bands whose names I (sometimes only dimly) recognized. In addition to these genuine artifacts of bygone rock ages, the Paradise Artists booking agency also represented a selection of sonic simulacra, tribute bands including The Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular, The Spirit of Michael Jackson, and Rock N’ Roll Fantasy Camp. Presenters – people who run theaters and arts festivals – would sometimes form a small crowd to talk to Bill about his roster. Bill would hold up CDs and DVDs and explain a band’s significance to a long gone Top 40. Sometimes (as in the case of the Ides of March) this consisted of only a single hit in the ’70s.

“Eye of The Tiger”, Bill prompted helpfully at one point. A guy with an ill fitting safari suit had been thoughtfully twisting the display stand around and had stopped at the Survivor CD, obviously trying to remember why the name seemed so familiar.

My booth was not so popular. My backdrop consisted of a silhouette of a woman seemingly attacked by half a dozen microphones. On my display table, posters featuring disembodied projected eyes, a person with an accordion in space on top of a crane, gigantic images of planets circled by gramophones. I was representing Squonk Opera, a multi-media musical troupe, based in Pittsburgh, who had been staging acts of “sonic hooliganism” and “rust-belt Dada” for almost twenty years.

“We’ve played everywhere from Broadway to the Edinburgh Festival!” I explained to George, an elderly presenter from a theater in Saukville, Wisconsin, population four thousand.

George’s kindly eyes glanced at the posters, then looked at me, still uncertain whether he should have paused at my booth at all.

“We’ve won the same award for theater design as The Lion King.” I offered my trump card as I moved even closer to George.

George then relaxed into a complete halt.

“Your shows look very intriguing. But are you sure they are family oriented?”

“Oh yes! Kids love our stuff. Its very spectacular, as you can see.”

“Well. We have a lot of retirees in Saukville. Even I’ve retired. I’m really running this theatre as a community service you know. I used to organize busloads down to Chicago to see the latest Broadway musicals. But since I’ve stopped doing that, people keep asking me “What are we going to do now, George? We want to see something new!”.

“Well, the most common remark we get after our shows is: I’ve never seen anything like it!“

George left clutching a flyer for that night’s showcase performance by Squonk Opera, promising to attend.

Squonk were performing excerpts of their latest show Mayhem and Majesty, for two nights in a row during the Midwest Arts Conference, Indianapolis Sept 13 – 16 2010. As their part-time Communications Director, my job was to hustle up interest in their act. For the duration of the conference, I sat by day in my tiny black booth in the Indianapolis Convention Center, one of eight hundred other artists, manager’s and agents also hawking their entertainment booty to middle America’s performing arts venue managers. By night, I introduced Squonk’s ‘best of’ concert at a nearby venue. The troupe then replayed excerpts from Mayhem and Majesty every half hour until 11.00pm. I alternated between circling the crowd, urging people to drink, asking for business cards, then sitting on the back steps watching people’s reactions as the sonic hooliganism unfolded.

Squonk, like thirty other showcase artists, had gambled a lot of money to perform at Midwest Arts, one of the biggest, annual performing arts trade fairs in the United States. The objective was simple: get on ‘the radar’ of presenters, and then into the programs of theaters across America. Would Squonk get enough bookings to help the surreal company survive, improbably, for yet another year?

Luxury digs

The drive from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis was a six and a half hour perfectly straight hair-part through corn and wheat fields. Once there, we checked into the conference hotel room – four of us (Steve and Jackie, the artistic directors, Bob the lighting guy, and me) in a room with two queen beds. Sharing beds made the overpriced Westin fit into the Squonk budget.

“At least you get to share with us in a luxury room” Steve had counseled me before the trip. “The rest of the crew are bunched in economy rooms on the outskirts of town.”

Sharing a bed with anyone with whom I did not share a romantic attachment was not my idea of luxury. I had packed earplugs and was prepared for a sleep deprived week.

“Nicole and I intend to touch each other all night ” Jackie joked, trying to lighten my mood as we dragged our luggage and booth gear into the room. “Oops, did I say that out loud?”

“I’ll sleep on the floor” Steve said. Then he grabbed the remote, and in his other hand held up a can of mini frankfurts. “And heres my dinner”. Then Steve was half undressed and in the chair, the television was on, and stayed that way for the rest of our stay.

That night, after I had mashed Squonk cards into fleeting palms at the opening party, I returned to our room and collapsed on my side of the bed. Bob was absent, presumed in the lobby somewhere enjoying private time with his laptop. Steve was channel surfing and I quickly found myself riveted to the unfamiliar world of cable TV, as hypnotized as a chicken with a stroked head. Jackie returned from a late meeting to find both of us silently absorbed in the suffocating world of “Hoarders”, a reality show about people who compulsively collect trash until it takes over their whole house.

“How can you enjoy watching that?” Jackie exclaimed.

I didn’t know. But it was the same question I found myself wanting to put to the audiences of middle America’s performing arts centers as, over the next two days, I wandered around the trade show floor.

Where dreams come true

When Jackie or Steve had time to help me at the Squonk stand, I’d take off for a few minutes to wander up and down the rows of our rivals’ booths. These were crammed with Photo-shopped artist posters, merchandise, video screens. I could generally tell which agency had the most successful acts by the size of their digital screens and by the relaxed look of the agent. Broadway shows – or acts based on Broadway musicals, no matter how tenuous the connection – were at the top of the pile. They sold themselves.

“Why should I book you when I can get The Two Tenors for the same price?” a lady presenter had demanded from Steve at the opening night party. “If I book a Broadway act, I am guaranteed ticket sales.”

“Are you like Spam-a Lot?” a presenter from a college town in Missouri had asked me hopefully. “We filled the house with that one!”

Squonk’s stint on the Big Apple’s avenue of dreams had been a decade ago. They had messed with people’s minds at the Helen Hayes Theater on West 44th for three weeks, then holed up for three months at the innovative off-Broadway venue PS122. Jackie’s music was post-modern classical – Meredith Monk meets Elbow, with a bit of progressive rock thrown in. Not exactly thigh slapping feel good ditties.

I passed rows of more tribute acts – there were several rival Beatles ‘experiences’, who tried to differentiate their products by specializing in different periods of the Fab Four’s output: one group stuck strictly to the early 60s ‘Please, Please Me’ sounds and mop top look. Another group offered to take you back to their psychedelic period, and their agent hung their Sergeant Pepper’s costumes on racks behind her to prove it.

Genres that I thought had disappeared with vaudeville were apparently still alive and well. There were “mentalists” who could dazzle you with their psychic powers and hypnotic gifts. There were giant images of mascaraed men leaning towards the camera flourishing top-hats – magicians who offered “spine-tingling thrills and chills for the whole family”.

Other genres that were defying the relentless Darwinism of fashion, were also well represented. Folk music in all its scrubbed forms – celtic folk represented by men with well combed beards holding fiddles, bluegrass played by people with a full set of teeth and music degrees. You could also buy intimate nights with singer-song writers like Janis Ian, or inspirational one woman or one man shows with titles like ” 18 Reasons to Live, Laugh and Love.”

Finally, there were images of artists I had actually seen. The thin, well dressed lady from Pomegranate Artists represented New York’s former avant-garde, now so firmly established, they are perhaps now simply called ‘garde’: her roster included Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson.

“Whats Laurie up to nowadays I asked?”

“You know she just did some shows at the Sydney Opera House? ” the agent offered, picking up on my Australian accent.

“Laurie had a dream one night. She performed a concert for an audience that was all dogs. And when she woke up she thought “Thats what I’m going to do”. So she and Lou (Reed – her husband) were in Sydney curating the Vivid Festival a few months ago, and she announced she was going to do a show for dogs. And thats exactly what she did. Thousands of people turned up with their dogs and listened to Laurie’s music on the steps of the Opera House.”

“I can imagine that was a huge success.” I said, and I suddenly felt jealous. “Australians have the sense of humor and fun to really go for something like that.”

“Yes! Thats what we thought, we couldn’t imagine a concert like that working so well anywhere else.”

I wandered back to the Squonk booth, jealous on two counts: that I had missed out on Laurie’s canine concerto, where the audience would have been just as entertaining as the music; but also jealous of an artist who had reached the international stature where she could just wake up one day, and effortlessly make her dreams come true.

“Its because of art that we are here”

Over two nights, Squonk performed scenes from their non-narrative, experimental musical Mayhem and Majesty, in a glass atrium called the Arts Garden. The Arts Garden was a glass and steel structure that formed part of a walkway between buildings overlooking Indianapolis’s main street. As Squonk’s surreal video projections and kinetic sculptures looped and flew about the stage, I divided my time between staring at the streetscape of one of the Midwest’s most prosperous towns, and scrutinizing the reactions of the presenters in the audience.

At the conference luncheons, each keynote speaker had delivered an impassioned speech about the importance of art: “Its because of art that we are here”, each speaker reminded the diners, as we sawed into our microwaved chicken and apricot main. Each speaker reminded us that the role of arts administrators and theatre presenters was a sacred one. This was because the performing arts at their best opened minds, they provided a heightened experience of reality, a spiritual experience. As soon as the speakers left the stage, they were followed by bands who were providing the luncheon entertainment. The conference lunch spots were the most expensive spots in the conference, as artists/ booking agents paid premiums to strut their stuff in front of a captive audience of a thousand eaters.

Some of the spiritual experiences that attendees were then exposed to, which were greeted with enthusiastic applause, included a Ricky Nelson tribute show, and Ball in the House – a white A Cappala group that did R&B jingles “with no drum machines or tapes. Its all done with our mouths! Please keep fork clattering to a minimum.”

Despite the lack of ’60s nostalgia or tongue beatbox gymnastics, the Squonk showcases were going surprisingly well. After each performance, there were presenters who clapped wildly, then turned around and sought me out. Their eyes were a-gog. “I’ve never seen anything like it!” they said as they shook my hand, and we agreed to talk next week. By the end of our second night of showcases, I had enough cards in my wallet to suggest that Squonk would have bookings for the next two seasons. The company would survive to dazzle and disturb yet another day.

But one presenter who did not seek me out was George, the retired presenter from Saukville, Wisconsin. George had turned up on the first night, he was the first to arrive. He dragged out a cafe chair to position himself near the stage, and settled in with a look of great expectation. But as the show started and progressed, I could see George’s profile start to transform, brow and mouth melting like a wax figurine, drooping slowly from excitement to horror. In one scene, where high pitched frequencies transformed sand on metal plates into shape-shifting mandalas, George drew his fingers up to his ears. I immediately felt like a heel, a smarty pants fraud. I shouldn’t have wasted this kindly man’s time. But he stayed till the end. And when the show finished, he did not clap but sat in his seat for a while. Then he got up and walked slowly away like he had something on his mind.

LA Confidential

My feel-good at being in the empty row with extra leg-room evaporated like an inhaled mary-jane cigarillo. The doe-eyed dame with the bub was swaying excited-like towards the seat one over from mine.

“You got kids”? she asked. This without any invitation to talk from my eyes or body. These were slouched into a severe right angle away from bub and bag of bub treats that were now in the middle seat. That seat had previously been mine. Colonized in an earlier mental expedition working out how I was going to sleep on the goddamn thirteen hour flight from Melbourne to LA.

“No”, I grunted.

“Aww. But you’ve been around babies, you know what they are like?”

I shot the dame a glance. Snatched up my in-flight entertainment – “LA Confidential” by James Ellroy . I thought: “Hey toots, I’ve just had half my baby producing capacity sliced out, do you know what thats like?”. Just like joining the mile high club. As long as you keep the hospital uppers coming.

“Sure” I said “I know what babies are like.” Wise-cracking.

Bub got settled in the in-flight bassinet. The dame – what, 25, 26? – snapped open her cell. Started sweet-talking hubby in LA. V Australia intercom told everyone to quit the electronic device shenanigans. About to gun it down the runway. Toots took a while to sign off. Over and over again: “I love you honey” . Pausing. Grinning. Deep into her ear, some silky words were wriggling in from 8000 miles away.

I liked that.

I resigned myself to the inevitable. I know what babies are like.

I buried myself upright in my economy seat like a Jew in a grave. Bub screamed and gurgled every hour. Ripped me away from sleep each time she started to tenderly approach.

Fourteen hours later, LA customs. My digits: scanned. My face: scanned. I’m through. Free as a jailbird.

Waiting at the international terminal under China Air. Scanning crawling traffic for a red Toyota coupe with a cute DJ at the wheel. My eyes were fried sunny side up. My brain was running on emergency power.

This was the threadbare awakeness along which I coasted for three dream-like days. In America’s oldest city of dreams.

Santa Monica and Venice Beach

Dougee’s Santa Monica second storey, two bedroom corner apartment seemed, well, really Californian.

“It is!” he exclaimed. The lounge room windows looked out on date palms that waved into the fading light over California Avenue. Every door, cupboard and shelf was made of faded golden pine which radiated some kind of nostalgic optimism. The round plastic dining table was surrounded by brightly colored molded plastic ’60s chairs. The smell of nearby surf gently tinctured the air. “You can just imagine the Beach Boys living here, can’t you?” he asked proudly. The kitsch apartment block was built in the mid 60s, the hey-day of surf crooner power, and I could certainly feel a beach party coming on.

I’d known Dougee – aka DJ Dougee Dimensional – aka Douglas Stoddard – for years, maybe as long as a decade. But we had never met. I had admired Dougee’s band – The Gentle People – from afar. They were the classiest electronica/lounge act on the planet, one of the first and best bands to define the sound and look in the late 1990s/ early 2000s. Half the band is British, and Dougee had resided in London for many years.

A few years ago, Dougee had moved back to the USA, tired of the cramped and expensive London lifestyle. In NYC, he had met the love of his life, Brady, and they then moved back to Cali, into the Beach Boy’s apartment where I was now a grateful guest. Over the years, Dougee and I had written each other the occasional piece of fan email, and since I began my American Odyssey in May 2008, we had been periodically trying to work out how to meet in person. And so we had at last. My B(if)tek releases, I was to find out, turned out to be emotionally laden bleeps, CDs that had played in the background of Dougee and Brady’s courtship, music that, seven years later, now held a special place in their relationship. It was a good reminder of the power of music to seep into the cracks of unknown lives and produce magic.

The next morning, Dougee took me on a tour of Santa Monica and Venice Beach. Although Dougee continues to jet around the globe, recording videos in Paris, DJing in Russia and even Kazakhstan, he still needed a day-job to survive in LA. He kept good coffee and vanilla soy creamer on the table by moonlighting as a real estate estate agent.

The highlight of the morning was peeking into a celebrity mansion. Actress Rebecca Broussard (one of Jack Nicholson’s ex girlfriends) owned a property on one of the Venice canals and Dougee was one of the agent’s showing potential renters through. For a cool $8000 or so a month, you could live by the super-exclusive artificial waterway and take your pick of several ocean cooled bedrooms and bathrooms with corridor-length walk-in wardrobes, over-sized wall hangings and Spanish iron-work.

I sat outside on the patio and watched two Hispanic workers quietly tend to plants and fix some outdoor plumbing while a TV actor and actress husband and wife team critically looked over the interior. Later in the day, I was to observe that the glorious, sprawling fantasy homes surrounding Venice beach were empty during the day, populated only by Hispanic gardeners and maintenance guys, who labored in the heat to keep up the luxurious facades of their employers’ unoccupied monuments to wealth.

After the showing, Dougee and I strolled along the canals, lapping up the visual eccentricity of the wealthy’s ideas of the good life. The houses ranged from authentic 50s beach shacks with pink flamingo fences, to ginger-bread pseudo Tudor confections, to Spanish mission hybrids, to full-blown multi-millionaire beach front multi-level designer yuppie playpens. All threaded through with narrow ribbons of water, mock Italian (Venetian) bridges and ducks.

Then Dougee had to go back to his office on swank Abbot Kinney boulevard to work a while, so I was left to explore Venice beach on my own for a few hours. After a ‘salad pizza’, surely the essence of LA food, I wandered down to famous Venice beach. The beach itself is impressive, extremely wide, white sand, reasonable surf, although apparently the water is quite polluted from local run-off.

More fascinating is the long stretch of market stalls that line the boardwalk. In amongst the predictable tourist trinket hawkers, were liberal helpings of stoned rastas and other skanky ‘artist’ types selling possibly the worst stoner paintings the world has ever produced.

But the best entertainment was provided by the marijuana medicine clinics. The boardwalk featured two buildings dedicated to ‘kush doctors’, who had employed spruikers to wander up and down the boardwalk waving plackards proclaiming “The kush doctor is IN! Seeing patients NOW!”. I stopped one of the long haired spruikers, who looked like a young college student earning some extra cash while getting a tan, and asked him how it all worked.

“Well, you go through that door right there and make an appointment to see the doctor, and he’ll see you pretty much right away.”

“But how do I get prescribed marijuana?”

“There are certain conditions for which marijuana can be beneficial. Like pain relief for cancer. But there are other conditions too.”

“Like what?”

“Like, well, like chronic conditions like back pain. Or eating disorders. Or insomnia.”

“That sounds like most people I know” I said.

“Or attention deficit disorder.”

“You’re kidding me?”

Most people I know who smoked hooch regularly would not rate acuity of concentration and memory retention as some of the bonuses of regular THC ingestion.

I thanked the kid and zig-zagged my way to the end of the boardwalk, dodging steady streams of bronzed skateboarders and rollerbladers, ears filled with regular blasts of Goa trance from the incense hazed surf shops.

That night I caught up with Dave, an old film buddy of Tanya’s from her San Francisco days in the mid 1990s. We met for Mexican and margarita jugs at a Venice beach cantina. He brought two buddies, Harold and Noah, both involved in the music side of the film industry – Harold as a music supervisor, Noah as a composer. We chatted about the state of the industry, the laughable amounts of money MTV offered composers, the merits of a local Iron Maiden tribute band that was all girls. Then my brain turned to mush from jetlag and tequilla, and thats all I can remember, apart from Dave paying for my food and kindly offering to give me a tour of Hollywood on Saturday.

California Dreaming

“I am so grateful to have been a kid growing up in California in the ’70s. You know, it was so cool to come down here and see all the hippies, such a happy vibe, so much potential and optimism. Anything goes, people doing the most way out things.”

We were driving through the lush hills of Topanga canyon, inland of Malibu, and once home to many communities of alternative lifestylers. Their presence could still be felt in the names of retailers “The Inn of the Seventh Ray”, and fellow drivers with long silver hair. Dougee’s car stereo kept up a constant stream of happy vibe music, a lot of it easy listening and kooky psychedelia from the ’60s. As we swept along under the perfect blue spring sky, I found my consciousness of the present dissolving with late ’60s/ early 70s California. Transported back in time to a past that seemed completely familiar, even though it wasn’t mine. A past transmitted and re-transmitted through millions of faded TV images, films, music. At one point we were cruising the Pacific Coast HIghway, entering Malibu just as Hall and Oates funky guitar swirls slid to the top of the random playlist: “This is where it all happened!” Dougee exclaimed. “West Coast rock baby!” Never had yacht rock seemed so right.

By the time we wound down Mulholland Drive and somehow ended up in Brentwood, I was living in an episode of the Brady Bunch – so many ’60s and ’70s suburban palaces, so many balmy, perfectly manicured streets. Only now Mike and Carol Brady would need to have inherited mega-bucks from their deceased former spouses to afford to buy a home in this now exclusive suburb. At one point we swung just north of Brentwood and entered the truly hallucinatory atmosphere of Crestwood Hills – steep foilage drenched hills packed tight with mid-century modernist homes, each one architecturally unique, each one gazing serenely out onto panoramic views of the San Fernando Valley. I was now in the pages of ’50s Home Beautiful – a vision that will be preserved forever, as the area has recently been declared an architecturally significant enclave and none of those Mondrian inspired pleasure pads will ever be torn down or modified until the end of time.

Later that evening, Brady, Dougee and I put on our night outfits and psyched ourselves up with some synchronised disco moves.

Then we made the hour long trip to Silver Lake so I could a radio interview with the internet based radio station Luxuria . Silver Lake, east of Hollywood, is one of LA’s hippest areas, a student and artist hang-out. Compared to Santa Monica, not many trees and not much fresh air, but plenty of Hispanic culture and cheap eats.

Luxuria broadcasts from a run down, low set building with several apartments, all occupied by artists, some of whom are involved with the radio. “A bit like an artists’ commune” Dougee explained.

As Brady, Dougee and I hung out in the lounge-room waiting to go on air, I wandered around taking snaps. We uncorked champagne and wiggled to the funky sounds of Julie and Renata’s SpinOFF show. Various people wandered in and out. A woman with pretty eyes and unassuming demeanor wearing tracky dax turned up with a lap-top. She obviously knew Dougee well (Dougee used to have his own weekly Luxuria show until he got tired of the long commute). She was introduced as Lisa. I took more happy snaps.

When I eventually got on air, Julie asked some great questions and the interview went off without a hitch. Lisa sat in and quietly grooved and nodded. Later, as Dougee, Brady, Julie and I were bundling ourselves back into vehicles, ready to go cruising for some late night clubbing, Dougee told me that Lisa was the legendary Lisa Coleman of Wendy and Lisa / Prince fame. All women involved in dance electronica owe a debt those ladies shaking their sexy booty with those wild ’80s keyboards! Lisa came out to say good-bye and kindly offered to “absorb” my website. But I was then too awestruck to say anything but a wide-eyed “thanks!”. Then we all went our separate ways into the humid LA night.

Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Dave stooped down and reverentially placed the mini bottle of JB whiskey on the headstone. “Whenever I come here, I make an offering” he explained. “John Huston is my favorite director.” Then he burrowed into his bag and produced two more JBs. These we cracked, then toasted one of Hollywood’s most influential filmmakers. “Thanks for the inspiration, John”. Dave skulled. I sipped, then clutched the remains as we took off for a stroll amongst the glamorous dead.

Hollywood Forever Cemetery, in the heart of Hollywood, was a good place to start a Hollywood tour as it contained arguably all that was left of what once made Hollywood great. The were the graves of Cecil B. DeMille, Woody Herman, Douglas Fairbanks, Zoltan Korda, Tyrone Power, and many more celebrities from Hollywood’s golden years. Plus countless character actors from the silent era right through to the 60s, whose faces are now far more likely to be recognized than their etched names. No shortage of memorable epitaphs here. The most famous: Mel Blanc, the voice of hundreds of Warner Brothers cartoons including Bugs Bunny, signed off with: “Thats all folks!”.

As we wandered, Dave told me a little about his work in Hollywood In recent years, his bread and butter had been as a ghost writer for many big budget Hollywood films, which meant writing for a target audience of adolescents and young adults. “They are the ones with the purchasing power, the demographic all the studios are trying to sell to. They are the ones that buy the merch.” That was one reason why Hollywood movies had been getting dumber and dumber in recent decades.

Another reason was the piece-work outsourcing of script development. Dozens of ghost writers can work on a single script. “You get given a single page, maybe two, and you’re paid to ‘improve’ it. Lets say its a comedy, you have to make the dialogue funnier. But you don’t see what comes before or after because the producers are paranoid about the storyline getting ‘stolen’ or leaked. So of course, what gets produced in the end doesn’t make any sense. So many of these films are not just dumb, they also don’t hold together logically at all, they are literally nonsense.”

Despite the mad scrabble for the teenage dollar, the local film industry was losing financially. Many production houses had shut. LA producers were now heading up the coast to Vancouver, Canada, to shoot, ridding themselves of the expense of employing local unionized labor. As we cruised down Sunset Boulevard, the sense of better years long gone was palpable. A kind of dusty sleepiness had settled over the sidewalks and nondescript shop fronts. Dave pointed out the last movie equipment hire vendor left in town. He also pointed out the Viper Room and the Whiskey-a-Go Go (where bands apparently now ‘pay to play’), both a blur as we shot past, but what I glimpsed looked like some of the older venues in Melbourne that had gone to seed.

When the district had rescued itself from near ghettoization a few years ago, its economic salvation came by way of nests of retail chains like Gap clothing which opened up on Hollywood Boulevard. By the time we parked there and scuffed down the famous pavement of stars, we had had a few more ‘John Hustons’, courtesy of the Hotel Figueroa in downtown LA. But despite being significantly buzzed, if there was was still magic in the air, I couldn’t feel it. Except perhaps in the handful of art deco neon signs still clinging to the outside of once iconic buildings such as The Egyptian Theatre (now the American Cinematheque) and The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel (said to be haunted by a number of celebrities including Marilyn Monroe). The rest of Hollywood’s most famous strip was crammed with tourists who were more interested in buying T-shirts than learning about the artform that made the area world famous in the first place.

A sucker for punishment, I had booked myself on the red-eye back to Pittsburgh that night – leaving 11.00 pm, arriving 9.30am the next day. We had time to kill so Dave took me to a Hollywood Thai restaurant that boasted an extremely popular Thai Elvis impersonator. As we blew our sinuses out on Tom Yum soup, Thai Elvis slowly gyrated, crooned and stared at the packed mess hall of eaters through wraparound sunglasses. The King’s ‘band’ were backing tapes that somehow sounded Asian, although I’m sure they weren’t.

Dave said: “Elvis is a metaphor for America. Started out young, vibrant, absorbing so many cultural influences, rebellious, visionary; ended up as a gross, bloated, sold-out parody of himself.”

On the way to the airport, we passed row upon row of LA’s signature skyline: absurdly tall, spindly date palms, now in deep, shaggy silhouette against the setting sun. Dave told me about hanging out with Hunter S Thompson, going on crazy binging trajectories about town in the hope of scoring an interview – which was, in the last hour of his departure, finally granted. Meeting Allen Ginsburg, and telling him about the shockingly clear dream Dave had had decades ago that changed his life – where Jack Kerouac appeared and told him to leave his mid-West birthplace and “go to California”. There was something about how Jack appeared and some other things he said that convinced Ginsburg at least “It was really Jack. He really paid you a visit.”

Kerouac, Ginsberg, Thompson, all outraged, counter-culture visionaries, all dead. I had expected LA to be buzzing, glitzy, shallow perhaps, but not the way I had felt and seen it. Downtown LA and Hollywood at least felt like urban ghost towns, slowly being entombed by mall culture. In the surrounding districts, Hispanic communities were rapidly expanding, but their poverty was obvious. Dotted along the streets were new evangelical shop-fronts, ‘end of days’ fundamentalist preaching shops, sucking in the desperate and mono-lingual. The term ‘spiritual vultures’ came to mind.

I said “Do you think LA is now just another tourist town, trading on its past? Its glory days are over for good?”

Dave said. “Probably.”

Then we were whumping my bags back onto the LAX terminal tarmac again. A goodbye embrace, then I headed for the United counter, hoping I had time to check in my bags, request a seat in a baby-free row, and slug down another John Huston before I settled in for the last sleepless leg of my journey back ‘home’.