Brown Neon, page 10
Art is a hostile place.
In its own attempts to build monuments to itself, art literally builds fences. Some of us still make it through, cracking the obstacle course with aplomb either as practitioners or interlocutors. Many don’t. Still, the prototypes were a shock you should have seen coming—their hostility doesn’t exist in a void. It’s there for a reason. And arming itself with the relentless shock of the now is a good a reason for the art world to ride out and leverage the frightening moment trapping us all.
Declaring eight border wall prototypes as land art: an art-bro provocation. A didacticism of trolling or the trolling of didacticism. Still, while these new, insidious monuments rise, older monuments are brought down by individuals working across difference and conceptual execution. Bree Newsome’s act of civil disobedience lit us up when she was arrested for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house grounds.15 Or Therese Patricia Okoumou’s Statue of Liberty sit-in protesting the separation of migrant families at the border on the Fourth of July.16 Several contemporary city governments eagerly marching toward the progressive horizon do so literally in the middle of the night, as happened with the disappearing racist statues in Baltimore, where four Confederate monuments were dismantled a week after the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.17
And yet the wall prototypes were the surprise we didn’t know we needed. A metaphor so brutally obvious. A brutalist movement revived by a populace’s desire for an art inching closer to an open identification with fascism. An antagonized reminder of history repeating all over itself, the border an exhausted hamster wheel, a Sisyphean crossing where migrants are only ever seen as laborers if they are seen at all. What else can we squeeze out of the border? You stop asking yourself how art could be involved in a fascist project. Art has never left its side.
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I am famished by the time we pass through the border checkpoint at Otay Mesa. As soon as we get back to Chula Vista, Michelle and I stop for some amazing carne asada tacos, deep fried quesadillas, and Mineraguas. The tacos were equal parts spirit cleanser and spicy meat fix, since our friend Ceci’s wedding is offering guests vegetarian fare. But it felt good to be in a space of sensory and familiar pleasure. Couples bickering and their children squealing at the tables and red vinyl booths around us, the speakers in the strip mall taqueria blaring the latest reggaeton. We could eat and we could enjoy ourselves, be reminded that there was so much of ourselves still capable of bringing and feeling joy even as each new day and week with the Trump administration meant something unimaginably nefarious coming to fruition. A sensate for the improbable. If we lost our joy then we had lost everything. If we could keep our families together for one day, we might as well revel in the ephemeral and hope we could still summon the memory.
They want our tacos but they don’t want us, I sing-sang in a familiar protest rhythm between bites. I savored every bite of roasted green onions, cilantro, and smoky chipotle red sauce. But that was true before a wall. We want so desperately to belong to ourselves that we still await liberation through representation. And the cultural zeitgeist put that burden of recognition on whomever could master narrating the democratizing logics of the taco for a public bummed out by the xenophobics in D.C.
Son capaz. Michelle is right. They’re capable of extracting even the food we make from us behind the barriers—whether they’re the ones in Otay Mesa or the points that connect the stitches between here and Brownsville and Matamoros, the points of land that kiss the Pacific on the West, with the Sea of Cortez in the middle and the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the demarcation.
I drive Michelle back to her sister’s house and head to my three-star discount app hotel room in Pacific Beach, a little neighborhood south of La Jolla in San Diego, to get ready. We would meet back up again for the wedding. It feels strange to pull out my suit, though it is the suit of my dreams—charcoal gray sharkskin. I blew my grant money getting it tailored to my short and stocky butch body, even though I bought it for ten dollars a decade prior. It feels good to lay it on the crisp white comforter that makes my hotel bed look like a cloud. I want to crawl under the bedding though. I have it pretty cushy, considering where I would lay my frayed nerves for the night, which reminds me of the way mobility works for anyone with a U.S. passport. If I had more time, I could soak my feet in the tub. Instead I pull my black socks and black brogues out of my weekender bag. I feel more awake, ready to be social, once I am out of the shower and have buttoned up my white shirt. I pull out a gray tie, then a red one, and finally decide to go white on white. It feels strange to see myself fill the suit out handsomely when my synapses are firing off rounds. I am abuzz with fear and fury as if I’ve spent the last few hours chain-smoking one hundred cigarettes. I step out of my room into the parking lot to collect my truck and feel the bay breeze on my gooseskin. I feel overdressed walking past everyone at the resort hotel wearing swim trunks and suits, children in an array of inflatables around their limbs and bodies. I am off to see people I haven’t seen in twenty years—aging punks from San Diego, the nihilist crème de la late nineties post-hardcore crème, a screamo-emo scene carved out by this fellowship of misanthropes. This day was dedicated to reuniting with those with whom I built my tastes for dissonance and off-time signatures alongside the anarcho-politics that roared against a state building walls for people and dropping trade regulations.
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In 1994 I was eighteen with a bullet, aching to see any live punk rock any chance I could get. And I did. By then my parents had long accepted that my mode of resistance meant not seeing me most weekends while I stood in the periphery of the mosh pit for any Rocket from the Crypt shows happening from Westwood to Tijuana. That summer Ceci, Torie, and I would drive south on I-5 to catch San Diego emo-billy faves doing a secret show at Ché Café. The Ché Café continues to be a worker co-operative, gathering space, and live music venue located on the University of California San Diego campus in La Jolla, California. Its exteriors are decked out in murals of Ché Guevara, Rigoberta Menchú, Karl Marx, and Angela Davis, and it has hosted every emo band that ever mattered to me. Everyone’s played there. Even Los Angeles’ own Rage against the Machine, when they were on Columbia Records, would do secret sets for the homies from Zack de la Rocha’s Inside Out straightedge days. Everyone loves the Ché Café. Even de la Rocha described it as “a place that is not only a great venue, but a source of inspiration and community-building for any artist, student, or worker that has entered its doors.” The Ché has a storied reputation as a place where any revolutionary can grab a hummus sandwich, much to UC San Diego’s chagrin. To keep university officials off their scent, the café has signage that reads “C.H.E.—Cheap, Healthy Eats.”
San Diego in the early nineties had a vibrant underground of punk musicians who had learned their instruments well enough to start innovating on the genres that birthed them. It was punk but it was melodic. It was melodic but it was also relentlessly erratic. It was chaotic but it was also pertinent to my long nights of contemplation during those early days of one-dollar-gallon-gas road trips back home from San Diego. One of the most noteworthy bands emblematic of the “San Diego Sound” was Antioch Arrow. They toured their brand of minute-long songs up and down the West Coast, stopping one sweaty San Fernando Valley afternoon in northeast Los Angeles to play a storage garage someone had turned into a DIY venue. Antioch Arrow stopped in to see if they could open for my other favorite band, Los Crudos, from Chicago. As soon as Antioch Arrow turned up the knobs on their Marshall stacks, all you heard were the frenetic guitar wailing and snare drum slapping, and all you saw were human spinning tops wilding out like dirty white boy blurs on a Van Gogh canvas.
Us Los Angeles kids were hooked. We started wearing high water Levi’s Sta-Prest jeans and white studded leather belts, and combing down our hair like Dr. Spock from Star Trek. And I started to follow that band around, which meant finding myself often in the strange beach underground that was San Diego. Antioch Arrow broke up two years later, but the members started other bands that I wanted to see. And San Diego was a scene I wanted to belong to, although I would never admit that to anyone in Los Angeles. It was easy enough to get down there with Ceci, who was soon my roommate in a two-bedroom in a neighborhood that she called Echo Park and I called Silver Lake. We were right on the border and anyone who came over always argued which side of the line we lived on back in 1998. I’d come home some days from my weird digital music label in Santa Monica to invitations from Ceci to head to San Diego to see a band play.
I’m too tired, dude.
Don’t ever let your job dictate your life.
… Fine, let’s go.
Ceci and I both loved the music, the scene, gathering together around the sketchiest of locales in the alleys and surf shacks of San Diego, pounding Tecates with the locals while the Pacific pounded the shore. But she enjoyed hanging out with those young men in ways I didn’t, and they ended up becoming closer to her than to me. This was back when she used to rock a horn on her head, greased up with Royal Crown that made her look like a girl Ed Grimley. She eventually moved to San Diego after finishing up law school in Los Angeles to practice housing advocacy for numerous projects working with the homeless.
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I leave my hotel and drive down the main drag with Sail Bay to my left and Fiesta Bay to my right. It’s stunning. But I realize I could probably never afford to live in this, the Southern California of postcards. I park my dusty truck half a mile from the Women’s Rowing Club in a Pacific Beach neighborhood with Spanish-style mansions and multilevel Craftsman bungalows and hope I don’t break a sweat under the bright sun getting to the venue. Just as I start to saunter my way to the sidewalk, I hear a raspy-voiced charlatan call out my name—or my punk rock name, that is.
Is that you, Rocky? I turn around and see the old bastard himself. Isreal has a distinct growl that shoves itself into an earworm every time I drive through Pomona, California. He was the singer for a band called Man Is the Bastard and a difficult figure in that nineties scene, so seeing him with a full paunch, a five o’clock shadow of strawberry-blond fuzz on his face, and a ratty, thin glen-plaid blazer gives me pause for the ways relational dynamics shift as we age. I feel my shoulders relax as he comes in for a warm hug. He is a sweet man, glowing with an aura soaked in pain, wounded in all of the obvious ways. Ours was a generation forced to stiffen our lips, deny our needs for nurturance, and wing it when dropped in the oceans of intimacy with no recourse. We were red flags waiting to be set on fire.
Oh shit, Loomis Slovak? That was the name of his other band when Man Is the Bastard temporarily kicked him out. How long has it been? Last time I saw you we were both flirting with sobriety at the House of Pies. Where’s your partner?
Oh man, I saw you at the beginning of that relationship. Well, two kids later and a move to Temecula, she’s decided she wants to divorce me. He says it with a grimace, and then I grimace.
Well, shit, you got two really cute kids out of it. And now we’re at a wedding!
He shrugs. Well, I’m flying solo. Let’s wingman each other tonight, yeah?
We arrive together and put IPAS in each other’s hands for the rest of the afternoon until Ceci and her seven-year-old come down the aisle. I tell him what took me to Tucson and he tells me that his wife resented him for robbing her of her lesbianism.
If memory serves me well, Sarah wasn’t your first queer rodeo, Iz.
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I start to load up on chips and guacamole and peek inside the rowing club, glimpsing quaint oil paintings of sailing superyachts hanging on wood paneled walls, when I see another ghost in the form of Patrick Delaney, who I hadn’t seen since our trip to Havana in 1999. We had gone to a young communist gathering on the ills of neoliberalism and globalization, bunking in dormitories that would wake up all the international inhabitants by blasting Silvio Rodriguez at seven in the morning. Pat and I were there mostly to hang out with Ceci and Torie, who were the politics punks. But I first encountered Pat on Los Angeles’s public radio airwaves. He used to host the afternoon show on KXLU that was my audio lifeline to bands like Fugazi and Alice Donut as well as to more experimental bands that studied punk like Slug or Laughing Hyenas from Chicago. His show gave me new ears for a world I was ready to inhabit, a world away from the Huntington Park that claimed me in a Catholic school uniform for many years. Of course Pat and I are tag teaming deejay duties for the wedding party once the ceremony and dinner portions of the evening are complete. I try to get him to play more cumbia for the bride’s Mexican side, but he is set on playing from deep in the crates.
I run into Torie and her husband, Anthony, and their vivacious five-year-old, Inez, who I hosted last August in Tucson during one of the desert’s hotter summers on record. I run into Leilani, who I hadn’t seen since the Free Mumia march we went to in San Francisco in 1998. And Nessa from Whittier, who every brown punk boy was in love with in 1998, and her daughters, who are her teenage mini-mes. I run into Quetzal and Martha and catch up on the local L.A. beef between curators of Chicano art and the artists whose precious archives they couldn’t penetrate, and the anarchist, polyamorous Fran with her new girlfriend. Monogamy—they are trying it out. I run into San Diego native daughter Maribel, who was Pat Delaney’s first girlfriend at twenty-three, and her white boo, Paul, who flew down from Portland. We were all late bloomers and sexuality was second to our music scenes. I run into so many great faces, all of whom hear about my visit to the border wall prototypes and my purpose for visiting them. Every conversation is meant to offer a brief history of land art as well as an anecdote about my personal interest. Or vendetta against it. The conflicted appreciation. The flurry of feelings that keeps dust deviling out of my mouth with each new IPA I swig. I am butchsplaining my ass off. And in every conversation I see the glint of panic.
These aging punks, stuffing shaved corn salad and roasted zucchini into their mouths and washing it down with Chardonnay, chasing the kids from their blended families around the wedding cake table, narrating every Drive Like Jehu show they ever attended and the time their eyes were pummeled by pepper spray at the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, showing off the Rocket from the Crypt tattoos that earned them free entry to every show until the apocalypse, never imagining things would get worse than Bush stealing the election or Halliburton siphoning every drop of oil out of Iraq or the invasion of Afghanistan in the name of nation-building.
I see Michelle again, this time wearing a form-fitting red cotton dress that makes her look like the dancing-lady emoji. She looks great. We both do, considering we came back covered in maquila toxins and border fence dust. I give her a look that says, Can you believe we did that? But she doesn’t respond in the same way. She is ready to dance her troubles away. Or to at least dance with her troubles. It’s a good coping mechanism. We would be in trouble for at least two more years.
7. Jack Balderrama Morley, “But Are They Pretty? Government Grades Border Wall Prototypes on Effectiveness and Aesthetics,” The Architect’s Newspaper, https://www.archpaper.com/2018/08/border-wall-prototypes-tests.
8. United States Government Accountability Office, “Southwest Border Security: CBP Is Evaluating Designs and Locations for Border Barriers but Is Proceeding Without Key Information,” July 2018, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-18-614.pdf.
9. Associated Press, “Prototypes for Trump’s Wall, Including Israeli Model, Take Shape on Border,” Times of Israel, October 20, 2017, https://www.timesofisrael.com/prototypes-for-trumps-wall-including-israeli-model-take-shape-on-border.
10. Carolina A. Miranda, “Is It Inspired or Irresponsible to Call Donald Trump’s Border Wall Prototypes ‘Art’?” Los Angeles Times, February 8, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-christoph-buchel-border-wall-prototype-20180208-story.html.
11. “Top Ten Art Dealers,” Forbes, May 3, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/pictures/mgg45egdg/4-iwan-wirth-42/?sh=3f34e7450074.
12. Randy Kennedy, “Police Shut Down Mosque Installation at Venice Biennale,” New York Times, May 22, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/arts/design/police-shut-down-mosque-installation-at-venice-biennale.html.
13. National Park Service, “Japanese Americans at Manzanar,” https://www.nps.gov/manz/learn/historyculture/japanese-americans-at-manzanar.htm.
14. Steven Blingo, “A Brief History of Heart Mountain Relocation Center,” Wyoming State Historical Society, November 8, 2014, https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/brief-history-heart-mountain-relocation-center.
15. “#KeepItDown Confederate Flag Takedown,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr-mt1P94cQ.
16. Victoria Bekiempis, “Woman Who Climbed Statue of Liberty in Immigration Protest Found Guilty,” Guardian, December 17, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/17/statue-of-liberty-climber-trial-us-immigration.
17. Jamie Grierson, “Baltimore Takes Down Confederate Statues in Middle of Night,” Guardian, August 16, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/baltimore-takes-down-confederate-statues-in-middle-of-night.
Art in the Time of Art-Washing
2018 | I was back at the Redz Bar of my queer adolescence, a pang of grief gnawing in my gut. The establishment had closed its doors in 2015, after more than fifty years as one of the few spaces in East Los Angeles for Chicana lesbians to congregate in conviviality. Redz, which reopened in late 2016, continues to be important to me, and I wanted to recognize its historic role in providing that crucial space by organizing an evening featuring the filmic works of Oakland-based artist Xandra Ibarra. The event marked my return to the bar under its new ownership.
