OBSERVATIONS AND RIFFS ON FORCING NATURE
James McCourt
Overheard at the exhibition, arborealist to aesthete (and allergy
sufferer):
“Excuse me, did I hear you say you prefer a picture of a tree to a
tree?”
“Yes, does that give you a terrible problem?”
* * *
Forcing Nature to my mind is not merely an instant-classic art book,
but the most astute critical observation of the truth of Los Angeles
since Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four
Ecologies. In it, George Haas stipulates the following:
“If you pay attention to the way your mind assembles images of the
world around you, you will notice that your eye roams around the area
in front of you, selects an aspect, focuses, then moves on to the next
aspect.” Haas is well aware that activity in the brain’s frontal lobes
then combines these frontal aspects (and also “rights” the picture,
which is delivered by the optic nerve upside-down) so that the mind,
free to combine them, fills in any deficiencies in its already pre-formed
idea of accurate representation. In our culture, the “accurate
representation of the world” is an idea essentially derived from
Renaissance painting’s fetish with linear perspective, and what we
experience around us is at best subjective. According to Haas, “The
photographs become a tool, a kind of thankga, or mandala, to remind
me that the way my mind experiences the world, is not necessarily
what happened. When something catches my mind’s eye, I check to
see if what my mind saw resembles what is actually there enough so
that something can be made into a photograph. If it is, I park the car.”
Riff #1. The mind’s eye:
The seventeenth-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley (after
whom incidentally that other part of the University of California, once
upon a time a beehive of dissent and counter-cultural enterprise, is
named), decreed that reality itself is conceivable only as an idea, an
accommodation with blunt sense data. Samuel Johnson’s famously
fatuous comeback was to kick a stone, wince in pain, and decree,
“Thus do I refute Dr. Berkeley.” Nevertheless, Johnson did not
succeed in blunting the point of this provocative declaration, which
has made itself heard again in our time in the many vexing squabbles
attendant upon physics’ most puzzling dictum, Heisenberg’s
Uncertainty Principle: “The more precisely the position is determined,
the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice
versa.”
Berkeley’s proposition actually has more to do with esthetics than
metaphysics—although metaphysics may be said to come into it if
and when, as with George Haas, the thangka or mandala, rooted to
the earth, is put in play—to remind us of the way the mind operates to
define things; or speaking existentially, the way the operation of
adjustable optic rods and cones precipitating the neuro-transmitter
experience in the frontal lobes is prior, not anterior, to the position of
the essential configurations of “tree reality.” Whatever of that. It is the
multiple operations (complete with the plethora of fantastic
embellishments available to a master using Photoshop) of George’s
Haas’s mind’s eye that have made Forcing Nature the book it is.
“The heroic tree images were originally shot in black and white. The
translation of the world from the full spectrum of light to black & white
is emotionally neutral for me. I don’t see the sadness or sense of
isolation so often expressed by viewers, only the heroism. All the
same, I eventually decided to begin experimenting to see if the same
subject matter in super-saturated color (and in Leonardo da Vinci’s
Divine Proportion) would bring about a completion of the contract with
the viewer. In that sense the black & white images inter-cut with the
color produce a kind of “double feature” experience.
Riff #2. Art is long and life is short, and great photography’s the long
and short of it. The real Da Vinci code:
These trees do not by rights belong in Los Angeles. (You can almost
see a bearded man in a long off-white garment, the worse for wear,
standing next to one of them, say at the entrance to the Harbor
Freeway proclaiming the fact with a text illegible to drivers, but his
nonetheless, scrawled on the big sign he is holding up: “Ecologically,
in terms of habitat, these trees do not belong here. We do not belong
here. Nothing and nobody belong here except sagebrush, chaparral,
tumbleweed and the Cahuenga.”)
All this is true: it says so in quite small print.
What these uniquely situated trees stand for (that situation as much
brought out by their being subjects of a rigorously trained eye as by
their occupation of a distinct space) is the fact that in the
realm of ingenuity, the true Angeleno is without peer. In the stern face
of nature’s dictates, mankind asserts his prerogatives—hers, too, of
course, because trees too are masculine and feminine.
Riff #3. Trees inhabit our lives:
Young boys, and some young girls, spend a large part of their youth
up in the trees, re-enacting the lives of our remote ancestors, the
chattering, meticulously self-grooming tree dwellers of Mother Africa.
We have installed in our consciousness the mythic Tree of Life,
charted quasimythic family trees, constructed elaborate semantic
systems based on archeologically researched language trees,
selected designated hanging trees (Miss Otis regrets; uncalendar
lunch). In our bodies themselves we discern trees of arteries, veins,
capillaries, mitochondrial etceteras and, lately, to explain everything in
the world, positing a branching design of selfsimilarity in Chaos
Theory. (This is of particular interest to those residents of Los Angeles
and other lovers of the fan-radial metropolis in countering the tired
calumny; Los Angeles looks like everyplace else, particularly
everyplace that is a suburb. Los Angeles does not look like
everywhere else, or anywhere else. With an absolute concentration
born of the more laudable aspects of the narcissism of survivors, Los
Angeles is like a actor sitting at the make up table, bulbs ablaze,
mirrors front and behind, replicating to infinity Los Angeles over Los
Angeles, or Los Angeles to this or that root or power: still only Los
Angeles.)
The young know this. For them any simplistic explanation of anything
at all is, as they’ve been saying, just so September 10th. George Haas’
s rhetorical points, perhaps because they straddle the afore-cited
divide in American history, are made both in the mode of delicately
nuanced simplicity—his black & whites—and, in his color series, the
mode of the wildest complexity meta-photography. It is always
interesting to offset discussions of Los Angeles with discussions of the
rest of California as such.
To begin with, California was mapped by the Spanish conquistadors
as an island kingdom—Baja pictured extending all the way to San
Jose with the Pacific on one side and the Gulf of California on the
other—one populated by black Amazons armored in gold and ruled
over by their queen, Califia. Thus was the myth of the Golden West
established. In the aftermath of the 1849 Gold Rush came the great
San Francisco “Barbary Coast” period, after which in the many
generations that have passed since San Francisco turned stately, and
particularly with the motion picture industry and after the Dust Bowl,
SoCal became the locus of the more metaphysical search for an El
Dorado of the mind, entailing not the denial of mortality, but the
refusal of temperament to cave to it.
The great majority of trees, like the great majority of people, would
seem to be the way they are in a matter of fact way. This includes
even the world’s great group tree manifestations such as the umbrella
pines of Rome, in place and self-renewing since the time of the
Roman Republic, the cherry trees of the Tidal Basin in Washington,
D.C., the cedars of Lebanon, the immense birch tree forests of
Russia, the live oaks of the Deep South, dripping with Spanish moss,
and the giant redwoods of Northern California.
Not so the star trees under surveillance in George Haas’s Forcing
Nature. George Haas, a student of bonsai as well as a master
photographer, is to lonesome tree photography what Hurrell and later
Phil Stern were, and are, to the Hollywood stars. His trees are stars
revealed and Forcing Nature is, apart from the inherent beauty that
makes the book a multiple perspective star turn of its own (complete
with the daring somersault action of interspersing black & white and
color images), a kind of arboreal Hollywood Stars’ Homes Tour.
Riff #4.
Just as the great stars—in particular the females but some males, too,
like Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, and
more recently River Phoenix and just last year Jake Lyllenhall, Heath
Ledger and Philip Seymour Hoffman—were possessed of a certain
commanding stillness in front of a camera, so these trees, gesturing
simply yet consequentially in their still-shot serenity, generate in the
spectator not some coinciding placidity, but quite the opposite
(according to that push-pull law regulating the kinesis of provocation
and response): a restless pulsation that creates the impression that
the spectator is pressing a point merely by intently observing—that
s/he is in some almost conscious way in fact pushing the plot along.
This cannot happen with the domesticated image, still or moving.
As like as like, George Haas’s trees will not be domesticated (as in
fact neither will a successful, properly restless bonsai).
The bonsai training is significant. What bonsai does is train trees to
appear more the way they ought to, to impart to them, as George
Haas has to his star trees something of the seal of dharma
transmission. This seems to me particularly evident in his amazing
take on a great local group-tree phenomenon, the coral trees in
stationary parade along San Vicente Boulevard (which I have recently
encountered in situ—yes, life imitating art—while sitting on the patio of
the Coral Tree Cafe at 6 p.m. on April 20th, 2006, in bloom in the
silver-nitrate half-light of the marine-layer mist just coming in from
Santa Monica Bay). Like the fabulous corps de ballet at the Maryinsky
Theater in St. Petersburg in the opening of Act III of La Bayadere, any
one of them could have been a star soloist in any other company in
the world.
Such is an example of the existential melodrama of the isolated Los
Angeles tree, coming to the city to become a star, a naked singularity
in the culture of sprawl, mall, stall, and gall. Take for instance the
coral tree at Camarillo (Coral Tree #4, Camarillo, 2004; black-and
white p26): like some greatly distressed ballerina on the run, perhaps
mad. (Perhaps like Garbo in Grand Hotel, she has never been so
tired.) Like so many of her sibling trees, high, dry, and lonely,
trapped to a degree in their own fabulousness, unable to get over
themselves.
Los Angeles was known to the indigenous Indians as the Valley of
Smoke and Mist (ideal environment perhaps then as now for
underground, degenerate, unsightly, drifter, vampire, unlawfully
immigrant, and other eccentric breathers of the living air of middle
night, renegade black Amazons undoubtedly included). Transformed
into sunny paradise by redirection of the Colorado River, with
installation of concrete culvert drainage, it was subsequently given the
whimsical (or metaphysical) name, the Los Angeles River. Vestigial,
ever-shifting traces of smoke, mirrors, and ambuscade remain, never
for long in one place. In this case what you don’t see is what gets you
nervous. In the words of George Haas:
“I use blur as an element in the photographs to represent the raw
data. I want to be constantly reminded that my view is an
interpretation of a world, not the world itself. It is a world where
everything changes, where everything without exception comes and
goes in an unending cycle of simultaneous expansion and
contraction, polarization and cessation.”
The literary poet laureate of Los Angeles is neither John Fante or
Charles Bukowski, who merely used the metropolis to signal their own
alternately frenetic and torpid self-absorption, but Raymond Chandler,
who invented so many signal aspects of the Los Angeles of reception
studies, making much of the arboreal component in conjunction with
his development of the classic Los Angeles femme fatale.
Riff #5.
I can’t help thinking that in terms of shooting L.A. trees (and what a
pity Tehachepi is so far afield, although those eucalyptuses at
Camarillo (Eucalyptus #3, Camarillo, 2002; black-and white p27) are
suggestive; I feel certain many interesting arboreal hellcats of the
female persuasion have been transplanted in both places) that its
flash life has for sixty years both hummed in narcissistic rapture and
ricocheted like sprayed bullets in a gangland shootout in imitation of
Chandler’s art.
Los Angeles indeed became, particularly in the 1940s and 50s, the
most lawless municipality since Boss Tweed’s 1890s Tenderloin New
York. Eventually, of course, the city was brought to book,
investigations instigated, indictments brought in and trials scheduled.
Riff #6.
The trees as witness: As for instance in the ongoing trial of Ecologist
vs. Developer (not to mention other single wreakers of havoc such as
the late Joan Crawford as depicted by Faye Dunaway in the 1980 film
Mommie Dearest: “Christina, bring me the axe!”), Superior Court,
State of California, County of Los Angeles. Headline: HAAS TREE
STAR WITNESS IN CUSTODY BATTLE. Who or what shall inherit the
earth?
The Los Angeles time problem in respect to tree cultivation is ever
more urgent: if and when it comes, “The Big One” will certainly uproot
a great many of the subjects starred in these pages. Let us therefore
take time to consider time not as money, but in terms of invested
leisure and opportunity, as signaled in the George Haas meta-
photographic process: "The long exposure is also a sense-enhancer
by compressing time, combining events into an accumulation we
could not otherwise directly experience. But, instead of reinforcing our
belief, we question what we are seeing, and in our need to make
sense of it, we generate a kind of opening in our otherwise rock-solid
belief.” (see above: the real da Vinci code).
Riff #7.
Underground Angelenos of course had, like these trees staked out
through masterful subterfuge and the subtlety of near-invisibility, their
own anything-but-narrow strip of territory not up in the hills, not at
first, but down on the flats at Metro, and over in Burbank at Warner
Brothers, and finally, eschewing in typical Southern California fashion
the comforts of the closet to let it hang out in al fresco venues, all
along Hollywood Boulevard and up in Griffith Park. Just like these
trees, as if suddenly, there they all were.
In 1937 the Redwood was proclaimed California’s state tree, obviously
by the NoCal lobby. In retaliation, the palm tree, planted en masse for
the 1932 Olympics, became the SoCal tree. And now that end of the
palm tree on Los Angeles is near, it is perhaps time to declare once
and for all in favor of the Eucalyptus (“well hidden”). Secret histories;
hidden pasts; covered tracks … all these resonate in Los Angeles.
Which brings us to Riff #8., on the phenomenon of certain SoCal
residents’ benighted planting of the NoCal Redwood in residential
locales (Redwood #1, Echo Park, 2005; color p16). This is surely
something like getting a Pacific Northwest lumberjack drunk and
setting him loose in a bijou Melrose Avenue antique shop. You can
fairly hear the Jacarandas of North Rexford Drive crying “Ayi, que loco
gringo!” as multitudes of flagstone patios are ripped apart as if in
small-scale slow-motion rehearsal for The Big One.
Therefore let Las Vegas, Phoenix, Palm Beach, and Miami have the
Palm, Southern California and its great metropolis Los Angeles, city of
the most ethnically diverse population west of the Mississippi, will be
happily and justly represented by variety upon variety of riotously
alluring, fragrant floribunda.
James McCourt
Overheard at the exhibition, arborealist to aesthete (and allergy
sufferer):
“Excuse me, did I hear you say you prefer a picture of a tree to a
tree?”
“Yes, does that give you a terrible problem?”
* * *
Forcing Nature to my mind is not merely an instant-classic art book,
but the most astute critical observation of the truth of Los Angeles
since Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four
Ecologies. In it, George Haas stipulates the following:
“If you pay attention to the way your mind assembles images of the
world around you, you will notice that your eye roams around the area
in front of you, selects an aspect, focuses, then moves on to the next
aspect.” Haas is well aware that activity in the brain’s frontal lobes
then combines these frontal aspects (and also “rights” the picture,
which is delivered by the optic nerve upside-down) so that the mind,
free to combine them, fills in any deficiencies in its already pre-formed
idea of accurate representation. In our culture, the “accurate
representation of the world” is an idea essentially derived from
Renaissance painting’s fetish with linear perspective, and what we
experience around us is at best subjective. According to Haas, “The
photographs become a tool, a kind of thankga, or mandala, to remind
me that the way my mind experiences the world, is not necessarily
what happened. When something catches my mind’s eye, I check to
see if what my mind saw resembles what is actually there enough so
that something can be made into a photograph. If it is, I park the car.”
Riff #1. The mind’s eye:
The seventeenth-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley (after
whom incidentally that other part of the University of California, once
upon a time a beehive of dissent and counter-cultural enterprise, is
named), decreed that reality itself is conceivable only as an idea, an
accommodation with blunt sense data. Samuel Johnson’s famously
fatuous comeback was to kick a stone, wince in pain, and decree,
“Thus do I refute Dr. Berkeley.” Nevertheless, Johnson did not
succeed in blunting the point of this provocative declaration, which
has made itself heard again in our time in the many vexing squabbles
attendant upon physics’ most puzzling dictum, Heisenberg’s
Uncertainty Principle: “The more precisely the position is determined,
the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice
versa.”
Berkeley’s proposition actually has more to do with esthetics than
metaphysics—although metaphysics may be said to come into it if
and when, as with George Haas, the thangka or mandala, rooted to
the earth, is put in play—to remind us of the way the mind operates to
define things; or speaking existentially, the way the operation of
adjustable optic rods and cones precipitating the neuro-transmitter
experience in the frontal lobes is prior, not anterior, to the position of
the essential configurations of “tree reality.” Whatever of that. It is the
multiple operations (complete with the plethora of fantastic
embellishments available to a master using Photoshop) of George’s
Haas’s mind’s eye that have made Forcing Nature the book it is.
“The heroic tree images were originally shot in black and white. The
translation of the world from the full spectrum of light to black & white
is emotionally neutral for me. I don’t see the sadness or sense of
isolation so often expressed by viewers, only the heroism. All the
same, I eventually decided to begin experimenting to see if the same
subject matter in super-saturated color (and in Leonardo da Vinci’s
Divine Proportion) would bring about a completion of the contract with
the viewer. In that sense the black & white images inter-cut with the
color produce a kind of “double feature” experience.
Riff #2. Art is long and life is short, and great photography’s the long
and short of it. The real Da Vinci code:
These trees do not by rights belong in Los Angeles. (You can almost
see a bearded man in a long off-white garment, the worse for wear,
standing next to one of them, say at the entrance to the Harbor
Freeway proclaiming the fact with a text illegible to drivers, but his
nonetheless, scrawled on the big sign he is holding up: “Ecologically,
in terms of habitat, these trees do not belong here. We do not belong
here. Nothing and nobody belong here except sagebrush, chaparral,
tumbleweed and the Cahuenga.”)
All this is true: it says so in quite small print.
What these uniquely situated trees stand for (that situation as much
brought out by their being subjects of a rigorously trained eye as by
their occupation of a distinct space) is the fact that in the
realm of ingenuity, the true Angeleno is without peer. In the stern face
of nature’s dictates, mankind asserts his prerogatives—hers, too, of
course, because trees too are masculine and feminine.
Riff #3. Trees inhabit our lives:
Young boys, and some young girls, spend a large part of their youth
up in the trees, re-enacting the lives of our remote ancestors, the
chattering, meticulously self-grooming tree dwellers of Mother Africa.
We have installed in our consciousness the mythic Tree of Life,
charted quasimythic family trees, constructed elaborate semantic
systems based on archeologically researched language trees,
selected designated hanging trees (Miss Otis regrets; uncalendar
lunch). In our bodies themselves we discern trees of arteries, veins,
capillaries, mitochondrial etceteras and, lately, to explain everything in
the world, positing a branching design of selfsimilarity in Chaos
Theory. (This is of particular interest to those residents of Los Angeles
and other lovers of the fan-radial metropolis in countering the tired
calumny; Los Angeles looks like everyplace else, particularly
everyplace that is a suburb. Los Angeles does not look like
everywhere else, or anywhere else. With an absolute concentration
born of the more laudable aspects of the narcissism of survivors, Los
Angeles is like a actor sitting at the make up table, bulbs ablaze,
mirrors front and behind, replicating to infinity Los Angeles over Los
Angeles, or Los Angeles to this or that root or power: still only Los
Angeles.)
The young know this. For them any simplistic explanation of anything
at all is, as they’ve been saying, just so September 10th. George Haas’
s rhetorical points, perhaps because they straddle the afore-cited
divide in American history, are made both in the mode of delicately
nuanced simplicity—his black & whites—and, in his color series, the
mode of the wildest complexity meta-photography. It is always
interesting to offset discussions of Los Angeles with discussions of the
rest of California as such.
To begin with, California was mapped by the Spanish conquistadors
as an island kingdom—Baja pictured extending all the way to San
Jose with the Pacific on one side and the Gulf of California on the
other—one populated by black Amazons armored in gold and ruled
over by their queen, Califia. Thus was the myth of the Golden West
established. In the aftermath of the 1849 Gold Rush came the great
San Francisco “Barbary Coast” period, after which in the many
generations that have passed since San Francisco turned stately, and
particularly with the motion picture industry and after the Dust Bowl,
SoCal became the locus of the more metaphysical search for an El
Dorado of the mind, entailing not the denial of mortality, but the
refusal of temperament to cave to it.
The great majority of trees, like the great majority of people, would
seem to be the way they are in a matter of fact way. This includes
even the world’s great group tree manifestations such as the umbrella
pines of Rome, in place and self-renewing since the time of the
Roman Republic, the cherry trees of the Tidal Basin in Washington,
D.C., the cedars of Lebanon, the immense birch tree forests of
Russia, the live oaks of the Deep South, dripping with Spanish moss,
and the giant redwoods of Northern California.
Not so the star trees under surveillance in George Haas’s Forcing
Nature. George Haas, a student of bonsai as well as a master
photographer, is to lonesome tree photography what Hurrell and later
Phil Stern were, and are, to the Hollywood stars. His trees are stars
revealed and Forcing Nature is, apart from the inherent beauty that
makes the book a multiple perspective star turn of its own (complete
with the daring somersault action of interspersing black & white and
color images), a kind of arboreal Hollywood Stars’ Homes Tour.
Riff #4.
Just as the great stars—in particular the females but some males, too,
like Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, and
more recently River Phoenix and just last year Jake Lyllenhall, Heath
Ledger and Philip Seymour Hoffman—were possessed of a certain
commanding stillness in front of a camera, so these trees, gesturing
simply yet consequentially in their still-shot serenity, generate in the
spectator not some coinciding placidity, but quite the opposite
(according to that push-pull law regulating the kinesis of provocation
and response): a restless pulsation that creates the impression that
the spectator is pressing a point merely by intently observing—that
s/he is in some almost conscious way in fact pushing the plot along.
This cannot happen with the domesticated image, still or moving.
As like as like, George Haas’s trees will not be domesticated (as in
fact neither will a successful, properly restless bonsai).
The bonsai training is significant. What bonsai does is train trees to
appear more the way they ought to, to impart to them, as George
Haas has to his star trees something of the seal of dharma
transmission. This seems to me particularly evident in his amazing
take on a great local group-tree phenomenon, the coral trees in
stationary parade along San Vicente Boulevard (which I have recently
encountered in situ—yes, life imitating art—while sitting on the patio of
the Coral Tree Cafe at 6 p.m. on April 20th, 2006, in bloom in the
silver-nitrate half-light of the marine-layer mist just coming in from
Santa Monica Bay). Like the fabulous corps de ballet at the Maryinsky
Theater in St. Petersburg in the opening of Act III of La Bayadere, any
one of them could have been a star soloist in any other company in
the world.
Such is an example of the existential melodrama of the isolated Los
Angeles tree, coming to the city to become a star, a naked singularity
in the culture of sprawl, mall, stall, and gall. Take for instance the
coral tree at Camarillo (Coral Tree #4, Camarillo, 2004; black-and
white p26): like some greatly distressed ballerina on the run, perhaps
mad. (Perhaps like Garbo in Grand Hotel, she has never been so
tired.) Like so many of her sibling trees, high, dry, and lonely,
trapped to a degree in their own fabulousness, unable to get over
themselves.
Los Angeles was known to the indigenous Indians as the Valley of
Smoke and Mist (ideal environment perhaps then as now for
underground, degenerate, unsightly, drifter, vampire, unlawfully
immigrant, and other eccentric breathers of the living air of middle
night, renegade black Amazons undoubtedly included). Transformed
into sunny paradise by redirection of the Colorado River, with
installation of concrete culvert drainage, it was subsequently given the
whimsical (or metaphysical) name, the Los Angeles River. Vestigial,
ever-shifting traces of smoke, mirrors, and ambuscade remain, never
for long in one place. In this case what you don’t see is what gets you
nervous. In the words of George Haas:
“I use blur as an element in the photographs to represent the raw
data. I want to be constantly reminded that my view is an
interpretation of a world, not the world itself. It is a world where
everything changes, where everything without exception comes and
goes in an unending cycle of simultaneous expansion and
contraction, polarization and cessation.”
The literary poet laureate of Los Angeles is neither John Fante or
Charles Bukowski, who merely used the metropolis to signal their own
alternately frenetic and torpid self-absorption, but Raymond Chandler,
who invented so many signal aspects of the Los Angeles of reception
studies, making much of the arboreal component in conjunction with
his development of the classic Los Angeles femme fatale.
Riff #5.
I can’t help thinking that in terms of shooting L.A. trees (and what a
pity Tehachepi is so far afield, although those eucalyptuses at
Camarillo (Eucalyptus #3, Camarillo, 2002; black-and white p27) are
suggestive; I feel certain many interesting arboreal hellcats of the
female persuasion have been transplanted in both places) that its
flash life has for sixty years both hummed in narcissistic rapture and
ricocheted like sprayed bullets in a gangland shootout in imitation of
Chandler’s art.
Los Angeles indeed became, particularly in the 1940s and 50s, the
most lawless municipality since Boss Tweed’s 1890s Tenderloin New
York. Eventually, of course, the city was brought to book,
investigations instigated, indictments brought in and trials scheduled.
Riff #6.
The trees as witness: As for instance in the ongoing trial of Ecologist
vs. Developer (not to mention other single wreakers of havoc such as
the late Joan Crawford as depicted by Faye Dunaway in the 1980 film
Mommie Dearest: “Christina, bring me the axe!”), Superior Court,
State of California, County of Los Angeles. Headline: HAAS TREE
STAR WITNESS IN CUSTODY BATTLE. Who or what shall inherit the
earth?
The Los Angeles time problem in respect to tree cultivation is ever
more urgent: if and when it comes, “The Big One” will certainly uproot
a great many of the subjects starred in these pages. Let us therefore
take time to consider time not as money, but in terms of invested
leisure and opportunity, as signaled in the George Haas meta-
photographic process: "The long exposure is also a sense-enhancer
by compressing time, combining events into an accumulation we
could not otherwise directly experience. But, instead of reinforcing our
belief, we question what we are seeing, and in our need to make
sense of it, we generate a kind of opening in our otherwise rock-solid
belief.” (see above: the real da Vinci code).
Riff #7.
Underground Angelenos of course had, like these trees staked out
through masterful subterfuge and the subtlety of near-invisibility, their
own anything-but-narrow strip of territory not up in the hills, not at
first, but down on the flats at Metro, and over in Burbank at Warner
Brothers, and finally, eschewing in typical Southern California fashion
the comforts of the closet to let it hang out in al fresco venues, all
along Hollywood Boulevard and up in Griffith Park. Just like these
trees, as if suddenly, there they all were.
In 1937 the Redwood was proclaimed California’s state tree, obviously
by the NoCal lobby. In retaliation, the palm tree, planted en masse for
the 1932 Olympics, became the SoCal tree. And now that end of the
palm tree on Los Angeles is near, it is perhaps time to declare once
and for all in favor of the Eucalyptus (“well hidden”). Secret histories;
hidden pasts; covered tracks … all these resonate in Los Angeles.
Which brings us to Riff #8., on the phenomenon of certain SoCal
residents’ benighted planting of the NoCal Redwood in residential
locales (Redwood #1, Echo Park, 2005; color p16). This is surely
something like getting a Pacific Northwest lumberjack drunk and
setting him loose in a bijou Melrose Avenue antique shop. You can
fairly hear the Jacarandas of North Rexford Drive crying “Ayi, que loco
gringo!” as multitudes of flagstone patios are ripped apart as if in
small-scale slow-motion rehearsal for The Big One.
Therefore let Las Vegas, Phoenix, Palm Beach, and Miami have the
Palm, Southern California and its great metropolis Los Angeles, city of
the most ethnically diverse population west of the Mississippi, will be
happily and justly represented by variety upon variety of riotously
alluring, fragrant floribunda.
James McCourt, author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, the tale of the
ultimate diva, has been for four decades a frequent visitor to Los
Angeles. He has often written on the city’s history and culture, most
recently in Queer Street, The Rise and Fall of an American Culture
1947-1985, and Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake, the continuing
saga of Hollywood megastar Kaye Wayfaring. He lives in New York,
Washington, D.C. and Crossmolina, County Mayo, Ireland.
ultimate diva, has been for four decades a frequent visitor to Los
Angeles. He has often written on the city’s history and culture, most
recently in Queer Street, The Rise and Fall of an American Culture
1947-1985, and Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake, the continuing
saga of Hollywood megastar Kaye Wayfaring. He lives in New York,
Washington, D.C. and Crossmolina, County Mayo, Ireland.
