Reading an essay this evening, I remembered this photo, which has been lazily gathering dust on my desktop for a week now.
Drove by the same place tonight in early evening shadow and muddled rain.
It's an old Maxwell House factory (brewery?). Smells like ten day old coffee left in a ten year old glass pot.
Also smells like cars and gravel and sunshine, even in the dark.
(Tonight as I drove over the tracks, a single train engine glowed in the distance: cinematic romance language at its finest.)
Somehow both light source and light gatherer, a big building like this, sitting in the middle of single-story, open horizon.
Most people dislike it, call it an eyesore, complain about the smell, give directions with its structure as a reference.
I always liked that it had an exoskeleton instead of a glossy facade.
Never seemed to hide its function but presented it simply and sleepily.
As if to say it knew other options but found theatrics dissatisfying.
It's in this great neighborhood full of taquerias, low-usage waterways, supermarket-size thrift stores, wild game hot dog joints and empty warehouses. Walls with graffiti on each block, beauty parlors (for beauty), massage parlors (not for massages), abandoned elementary schools, parks with missing swingsets, one-room Catholic churches, houses that are falling apart but affordable.
Street corners where entire families gather to sell rugs with polar bears or beer logos on them, corner stores full of incense and pinkie rings and tarot cards, men on bicycles with milk crates full of chicharones. Washaterias with pinball and Pac-Man, working pay phones on every block, pawn shops with Bible quotes on their awning, no contract cell phone companies.
One sunflower-yellow cafe next to a bingo hall, a school-portrait photography studio, a bail bond company with a neon hand (index finger pointed to the sky) larger than its front door, a funeral home, a florist that keeps only ferns and roses in stock and a costume shop that features a banquet room overlooking an elevated freeway.
Plus (and this is a personal fetish of mine) a lot of the streets are appropriately named for their function.
Canal Stree is over a canal, for instance. My (secretly?) utilitarian heart whimpers and whines.
Is this what I want people to say, how I want them to talk, about the reified me?
That my arm was self-reflexive in name?
That I could tell stories with lots of accidentally descriptive nouns?
That I easily was swallowed by details and then by oblivion?
That a quick list of my virtues was palatable and easily readable in fifteen seconds?
That a quick list of my virtues was palatable and easily readable in fifteen seconds?
That not long ago someone wrote on the interior of my belly, and the psychic ink refuses to dry, has turned to stars?
I've been thinking a lot about landscape lately. In the conceptual sense as much as the physical.
Want to do something about it now, something besides think.
Place is not avenged by offering itself up to us for sensate inspection alone,
but by shifting the ground under he or she who watches.
- Rachel Moore, from James Benning's California Trilogy: A Lesson in Natural History
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