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Letter from America: long days at the Hollywood DMV

5/8/2011

Air flight is amazing. Just 24 hours ago, I was in England packing my bags. Now I am in the Hollywood DMV (Dept. of Motor Vehicles) queuing up to apply for a driver’s license. I am not dressed appropriately for the Los Angeles heat: blazer and tie and a pair of grey slacks. A crazy old white guy is drawing attention to me by pointing and shouting, “Ni**er! Ni**er! Hey ni**er boy! Look over here!” I am amazed that none of the DMV staff (who are all black) punches him in the face. He continues uninterrupted. “Hey ni**er boy! What you doin’ here ni**er?”
Eventually, I whisper, “Sir, I am not an African-American.”
He looks shocked. “You got a problem with me calling you a ni**er? You some kind of racist, boy?”

I have moved to America for three months to research my next book. The subject is celebrity activism, so I’ve rented an apartment in Los Angeles. Everything is satisfaction, bar just one thing: I can’t drive. In Los Angeles, not being able to drive is the equivalent of being a paraplegic who lives on the top of a mountain. I can’t go anywhere.

Britain won’t give me a driver’s license. I’ve tried five times and the buggers won’t say yes. The test is insanely hard and even harder for an academic who is distracted by bird flight. The failure would be easier to take if the examiners were nicer people. Invariably, they are all bitter and fleece-wearing, and always seem to have been served their divorce papers on the day I want to pass. So I’ve decided to learn in California. The experience nicely illustrates the enormous difference between our two cultures.

The difference boils down to this: in Britain you look in your mirror and signal before turning. In America, you signal and then look in your mirror before turning. The emphasis in the UK is upon caution. In the US, it’s all about speed. In some circumstances, you can pass a red light. You are encouraged to cross your arms when turning the wheel. The driving test in the UK takes 40 minutes; here it can take 10 minutes. O, and the only maneuver you have to carry out is reversing backwards in a straight line.

And yet, at face value, America is far more bureaucratic than Britain. The DMV website is incomprehensible and you have to show up in person and queue to get anything done. Technically, you have to be a citizen with a Social Security number to get a license.

But all these rules are flimflam disguising a pleasantly nonchalant attitude towards regulations. The government is so underfunded that they can’t possibly be enforced; and so desperate for cash that they try to make it as easy as possible to pass. Take the “permit” test – the American equivalent of the theory exam. It takes place in a room with no cameras and no controls over what paperwork you bring in (I saw someone clutching a fat “How to Pass Your Permit Test” book). You take as long as you want over 36 brain-dead questions (i.e., “Is it legal to snort coke and drive over the speed limit in a 30 MPH zone?”). Then you queue and the paper is marked in front of you by a gorgeous Latino girl with a red crayon. If you fail, you get two more goes. If you fail twice more you pay just $6 and start all over again.

A guy in a “USA – Fuck Yeah!” t-shirt told me that all of this was done to help illegal aliens to get a license. “The government figures that it’s a way of getting them into the tax system.” There might be some truth in that. For some reason, I sailed through despite being a foreigner without a visa. In fact, I think I may now be a citizen of the United States: I am certainly registered to vote in California. I won’t say which party I ticked, as I like to maintain an air of mystery.

But really, it’s all part of that free-market spirit. Europeans don’t care what happens, so long as it is done right. Americans are more interested in the final product. They say, “You want to do this, and I want to do that. How can we strike a deal?” I want to drive and the state wants my taxes, so we negotiate an understanding. They’ll let me pass and if I kill anyone, they’ll take away my license. Strip away several decades of liberal lawmaking and you still find a pioneer spirit of risk and enterprise. Just ask the Mexican guys who hang around outside Home Depot, selling their labor to anyone who wants a hand moving a bookcase or mowing their lawn. For all our dreams of control and order, the economy ticks anarchically on.

***

My driving instructor is a punk rocker. This morning he told me all about the gang members he has taught to drive: “They’re just happy to have something to do that isn’t killing other people.” In Los Angeles, even crime takes on a glamorous, celebrity-orientated edge. The Krips and the Doritos (whatever) hold parties that you can hear the other side of town. They wear chunky jewelry and write best-selling rap albums about the travails of keeping an eye on your “ho”. We cruise through a city that is not a city, but an archipelago of blocks – some violently opposed to each other. I’m in Beachwood, which is rich, white, and a bit gay. East, there’s poor Hollywood, South there’s tourist Hollywood, West there’s Beverly Hills, North there’s a huge mountain range. But none of these places interact and people get from point to point by island hopping – getting in their car and driving straight from the Hills to Bevs, without stopping or passing Go or giving $200 to a Dorito.

The architecture is democratic. You want to live in a chateau? Then build a chateau! I live in what looks like a converted 1920s cinema, wrapped in sexy green lines and curves. Opposite me is the Doge’s Palace from Venice, complete with barber-shop polls sticking out of the ground. Chaplin built a grey castle two doors down. At the end of my road is a working ranch. When Los Angeles decided it wanted to compete with New York, it built a downtown in the 1980s. It’s a miniature Wall Street that erupts from the middle of the sprawling suburbs. Being California, they build swimming pools on the top of the skyscrapers.

My landlady is a fabulous Hungarian. She makes liberal documentaries and her apartment (which I sublet) is filled with a strange mix of anticommunist literature, portraits of the Virgin Mary, and erotic photography. There is a map on her fridge showing all the yoga centers in the city. Most incongruously of all, I found that she has a fine collection of scripts for British sex farces. The lines are marked in highlighter pen, so I think they have been performed. It gives me great pleasure to imagine a Hungarian acting troop delivering Donald Sinden’s lines in heavy accents in front of an audience of UCLA hippies. Perhaps Carry On is big in Budapest. I know Norman Wisdom is huge in Albania.

***

This is the first of many such letters. I'll be taking in New York, Las Vegas, South Carolina, and the San Francisco commune in the next few weeks. Right now, I’m going to have a drink. I’m in America, but those who know me well know that I long for the Southland really. I shall visit it soon and sit outside by the dusty road drinking Buds with old friends. Los Angeles is too smart, too sassy for that. Being so close to Dixie makes my ears ring. So I shall stretch out on the yoga mat and dream of that land of cotton.

In Memorium: Toby Jackman

5/6/2011

A brilliant academic, Toby Jackman, has passed away (see pic. left). With him goes the Cambridge University of old. It is a damning indictment of Cambridge’s current priorities that it didn’t inform its alumni of his death. I only found out myself two months later via a mutual friend. He was a dear, gentle, eccentric man who typified the academic aristocracy of the postwar West – eternally curious, yet strangely disengaged.

He was born Sydney Jackman, but took the name “Toby” in honor of his favorite teddy bear. After his Californian parents died, Toby was raised in Canada by his grandparents. He took a BA in physics (shudder) at Washington State, followed by a PhD in history at Harvard. He was very proud of the fact that his PhD was a biography: something few tutors would tolerate nowadays. Toby was interested in narrative and anecdote, which are discouraged in contemporary academia. It’s not true that he produced no further significant work, but he really used his Harvard connections to build an international collection of acquaintances and to turn himself into a latter-day flaneur. Among the names in his rolodex were Paul Mellon and John Julius Norwich. He collected art and distributed his family’s cash across the academic world. He excelled as an administrator and a teacher and established himself as a fellow of St. Edmund’s Hall in Cambridge. That’s how I had the pleasure of meeting him.

Toby took me and a friend to lunch one afternoon. He was tall and slight and quite blind, but was a charismatic magnet for conversation and gossip. He was fascinated by the revival of Catholicism in Cambridge (of which I was only a tangential part). High religion was to his generation a sin worthy of the Greeks but he reveled in the exoticism of our company. He struck me as an old fashioned Anglo-American liberal: more English than the English, but without their unpleasant snobbery. He was the kind of campus radical who might have campaigned (read: sign a petition) for nuclear disarmament, but not stopped too long lest he miss cocktails with Gerald and Betty Ford.

The point of a Cambridge education to men like Toby was to cultivate mind and character. The aspiration of getting a job was vulgar; equally silly as wasting one’s time and opportunity on drugs and sex. He threw out and absorbed the facts of art, literature, history, quantum-mechanics with the casuality of a woman discussing the neighbors beneath a salon hairdryer. Toby was a social and intellectual polymath.

When the lunch finished, he suggested we go Dutch. My friend explained later that Toby was rolling in money, but sometimes didn't offer to pay lest his guest take offense at the implication that he was penniless. I saw him a few more times and noticed that, as the years drew on, his dress became more avant-garde. By late 2005, he was walking around in what can only be described as dungarees and a cap. Pinned to the shoulder strap was a faded ribbon promoting a cause that had long been won. It was possible that he did all this because we were Catholics and thought we would appreciate his effort of "dressing down".

Now that Toby is gone, Cambridge is minus one less of those excellent men who stroll the riverbank in suits and hats. They sit in pub gardens stringing endless yarns about the time Isherwood tried to kiss them, or they performed the Heimlich Maneuver on Salvador Dali. They are the faint echo of a better, gentler age and I miss them all. RIP Toby and RIP Cambridge.

Conservatives and low art

4/26/2011

A small frustration I have with some social conservatives is their insistence that, when it comes to art, form and message are the same. I take the opposite view with Piss Christ, the ethereal study of the debasement of religious icons that is back in the news. True, submerging a plastic crucifix in urine is hardly the stuff of Titian, but just because an image is ugly does not mean that the message behind it isn’t nuanced or transcendent. Christ has already been nailed to a cross and forced to wear a crown of thorns, so why does suspending a tacky representation of Him in urine cause such offense? The photograph produces ambivalent emotions. At first glance, it looks like Our Lord is bathed in unearthly light. But knowing that he is in fact suspended in a waste product makes us … do what? Recoil in disgust? Wonder at the transformation of something so base into something so magnificent? For me, it re-dramatizes an icon that has become all too familiar and even mundane. It forces you to reconsider the glory and degradation of the Crucifixion.

(By the way, this doesn't mean that Piss Christ should have received public funding - anymore than the makers of Hot Tub Time Machine should've received a grant from the Courthold Institute.)

This is going to read like a leap into the dark, but I think the same ambivalence applies to the horror movie genre that so many conservatives deplore. I spent this Easter eating gummy bears and watching video nasties with an old friend, the theistic philosopher Nicholas Waghorn. I hadn’t noticed before just how conservative American grindhouse is. European directors like Dario Argento and Lionel Delplanque often use horror to push a progressive politics (animal rights in the former, gay rights in the latter). Some American directors have done the same, and George Romero’s zombie movies are a classic example of social criticism with slice’n’dice thrills. But the b-movie product of the late 1970s to early 1990s views like a recruitment video for the Moral Majority. The victims are the byproduct of Sixties morals: the horny, the greedy, the vacuous, the stoned. The hero is usually someone who has said no to sex ten times in the last ten minutes. Sometimes Christian hypocrites get it in the neck (literally), but it’s usually their hypocrisy that has offended the filmmakers rather than their theology.

Nicholas and I particularly enjoyed Brain Damage, a fine 1988 black comedy by Frank Henenlotter. The star of the movie is a charismatic talking parasite called Elmer. Elmer escapes a crusty old couple who are keeping him trapped in a bath and worms his way into the life of a young slacker called Brian. Here’s the deal: Elmer will feed Brian a hallucinogenic blue fluid if Brian will feed Elmer fresh brains. The trip the fluid induces is really cool, so Brian says yes.

Brain Damage does a better job of warning us off drug use than President George H.W. Bush, who was pedaling a similar message with the use of cartoons at the same time. But there’s an unsubtle anti-sex agenda in Brain Damage too. After his adventures with Elmer, Brian awakes on his bed covered in blood and sweat; his foggy memories are like a wet dream. He seduces his victims and, in one instance, Elmer pounces from his trousers as a sex-pot is about to give him oral relief in a boiler-room. Elmer is a saucy parasite that bears more than a passing resemblance to the worms in David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), which burrow into people’s bodies and turn them into randy drones.

Like so many others, Brain Damage was denounced by conservative critics for its sexual and violent pornography. It makes for difficult viewing, but its central message oddly affirms natural law. It can be placed into a cannon of conservative grindhouse offerings that deserve a rethink – Frightmare (idiot psychiatrists secure the early release of a cannibal from prison), Last House on the Left (middle-class couple dispense nasty but entirely earned justice on shaggy-haired hippies), I Spit on Your Grave (rape victim takes law into her own hands, NRA style), Driller Killer (guy takes revenge on noisy neighbors with a power drill, we cheer him on), or The Fly (scientist has a lot of sex with strangers, turns into a fly). Two subgenres are particularly worthy of mention. Possession thrillers (The Exorcist, Poltergeist) affirm the existence of God and the threat of Satanic invasion. Slashers invariably punish randy youngsters for getting-it-on well past their bedtime.

Many contemporary horror movies express vaguely conservative sentiments too. The Hostel series was dismissed as torture porn upon release, but they are actually a revenge fantasy of East Europeans against the sexual appetites of Western tourists. I don’t claim that anything I have listed here is high art or a conscious expression of Judeo-Christian values (they are far more likely to be a panicked response to the AIDS and drug pandemics that hit America when they were made). But the conservative would do well to re-watch them with an open mind. And a sick bag.

An Englishman Abroad: Not a Pretty Sight

4/21/2011

I’m moving to Los Angeles for the summer to begin research on my next book. There are many things I’ll be doing my best to avoid: traffic jams, heatstroke, knife crime. But top of my list is other Englishmen.

The Brits don’t holiday well. They make fantastic explorers because they have the bloody-mindedness to climb Mount Everest with nothing but a light overcoat and a thermos. A few bright exceptions make excellent immigrants: marrying a national, learning the language, converting to the local dung beetle cult etc. But when it comes to travel, we’re ever so embarrassing.

There are two categories of Englishman abroad. The first is the bruiser. Painted bright orange by the sun, he has the physique of a baboon and the manners to match. He stands in the middle of the street with a six-pack of Fosters shouting at his pals to catch up. He can be found vomiting outside nightclubs or smoking duty free cigarettes in a prison cell. The bruiser regards any effort by the locals to speak to him in their own tongue as an attempt to start a fight. All this violence is doubtless due to a drop of Viking blood – the Beserker urge to announce one’s presence in someone else’s country by breaking everything in sight.

The second type is the middle-class albino (albino because, while the bruiser goes orange in the sun, he goes as white as milk). The albino wears a grey shirt, khaki shorts, grey socks, and sandals. Sometimes there’s a hat meant for cricket and layer upon layer of sun cream. Bizarrely, he can be spotted carrying an umbrella at midday in the tropics (“Just in case it rains”). The albino makes every effort to speak the lingo, although it always descends into shouting loudly and slowly in English. Within two days of arrival, his wallet is stolen and he has been stung so often by Mosquitoes that he’s lost four pints of blood. While the bruiser leaves the country in chains, the albino leaves it on a stretcher.

What both these types have in common is a refusal to experience or submerge. E.M. Forster captured beautifully in A Passage to India the paradoxical desire of the Englishman to visit far flung countries just to rebuild them in the image of the country he left behind. Every nation does this to a certain extent, but the Brits are quietly psychotic about it (notice how parts of Malaysia look eerily like Tunbridge Wells). We won’t eat the local muck; we won’t learn the ugly language. We’ll just complain about the heat and stay indoors drinking cups of tea. This is something I remember vividly from my childhood. Whenever we went abroad, upon arrival at the hotel my family would unpack what seemed like our entire home: travel kettle, tea bags, biscuits, foot powder, pillows, fans, creams, books, jigsaws. I once went to Havana with my mother and, overcome by heat, we spent an entire afternoon watching Quincy on the satellite TV in the hotel room. [Actually, that’s a damn fine way to spend any afternoon.]

Of course, America is packed with witty, wonderful Englishmen who have moved there in search of their own peculiar dream. One of my great heroes is John Tunstall, a humble boy who left London in 1872 and moved to the American West to become a cattle rancher. He set himself as a gun slinger and a latter-day Robin Hood against the mobsters who controlled New Mexico ranching. He became the best buddy of Billy the Kid. It was Tunstall’s murder in 1878 that sent The Kid off on his angry killing spree and led to his own assassination. The ability of a small number of men, like Tunstall, to totally reinvent themselves is as unique to the English as the inability of the vast majority of them to empathize with foreign cultures.

But I too am guilty of this national disease. I know that some time – and I know not precisely when – I’ll feel the siren’s call to return to Old England. A part of me will miss the passive-aggression, the rich tea biscuits, PG Tips, Ed Milliband’s Ever Increasing Grey Spot, Friday night punch-ups, bad dentistry, and a well made gin and tonic. The sun will never set on our empire.

Religion and public life, a love affair

4/4/2011

[The picture is Leonid Brezhnev mixing work and pleasure at his dacha in the 1970s. It’s a stark reminder of the importance of wearing clothes.]

Last week, I spoke at a Big Ideas meeting on the subject of the role of religion in American politics. I did so as part of my self-appointed crusade to make a case for preserving a role for faith in public life. At the end I was asked a very good, deceptively simple question – how would I actually define religion? My talk had presumed that having faith meant joining a church, believing in doctrine, and living the life of a visible saint. But for the vast majority of believers, religion is about births, deaths, and marriages and little else. They think about God fleetingly and only at times of need. So why give a prominent role to something so unstructured and, sometimes, cynical?

However, the utility of faith is one the things that makes it so indispensible. Religion gives us a language to describe triumph and tragedy. Take that language out of the vocabulary and we’d be emotionally bankrupt.

One of the greatest works about American religion is The Puritan Dilemma by Edmund Morgan. Morgan argues, convincingly, that the fire and brimstone Christianity of the 17th century Puritans was actually a way of expressing and understanding trauma. They concluded that bad things happen to faithless people, that war with the Amerindians, disease, famine, and poverty were linked to moral culpability. The Puritans created a lexicon to describe their ethical ambitions, leaving us the timeless image of “a city upon a hill”. Morgan is softer on the theocratic prejudices of the Puritans than he should be, but he is right that Jeremiad culture was an attempt to rationalize disaster and find ways through it. Christianity permeates the Civil Rights movement in a similar way. The movement was not a Christian construct by any means (its opponents were often Biblical fundamentalists), but religion helped express ideas of righteous suffering and redemption. It is no coincidence that so many of the movement’s leaders were preachers, or that African Americans identified so strongly with the Exodus of Jewish slaves from Egypt.

Western society uses religious language and imagery far more than it realizes. Its values are there in human rights law or the casual evocation of brotherhood by politicians. When Jimmy Carter met Soviet leader Brezhnev at the 1979 Vienna Summit to discuss the control of nuclear weapons, the communist surprised the Baptist by remarking that “God will not forgive us if we fail”. Why did the commissar of an atheist state use such religious language? Probably because “God” is a way of expressing The Judgment of History – a supreme moral verdict that is beyond the transient, shortsighted opinions of man.

When the results of the UK Census are in, we shall discover the scope of belief in Britain. Doubtless, there’ll be mileage for the cynical in the mix of fantasy and ignorance that the survey will reveal (something I added to by putting “Jedi” as my religion. Process that, Lockheed). But the fact that so many British people don’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus but do believe in horoscopes, reincarnation, and angels is not to be dismissed. That’s religion in an eclectic, postmodern age giving expression to a genetic need for the divine. Whether religious, agnostic, something, or nothing, most people desperately believe that there must be something more than this. If not, then we are in Hell. The fragility of our bodies and the evil men do are not temporary trials, they are all we get.

Nixon's Poodle

3/30/2011

You can tell a lot about a president from the kind of dog he likes, and whether he likes dogs at all. Jack Kennedy surrounded himself with canines. His favorite with a welsh terrier called Charlie, who sat by his side during the Cuban Missile Crisis and proffered his head for a thoughtful scratch during moments of tension. After the Crisis was resolved, Nikita Krushchev gave the Kennedys a mongrel called Pushinka, who was the puppy of a Russian dog that had been used to test space rockets. Pushinka and Charlie had four puppies together. JFK called them pupniks.

In contrast, Harry Truman hated dogs and Reagan only got one towards the end of his term. Gerald Ford kept a stolid but dull golden retriever and George W. Bush had two egotistical Scotties (he called Barney “The son I never had”).

But the real surprise is the Trickster. In the slanderous but brilliant movie Nixon, Oliver Stone penned a scene where the hero’s own dog refused a biscuit from him in fear. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nixon loved dogs. Of course his most famous pooch was Checkers, but as president he kept three others: Pasha the terrier, King Timahoe the Irish setter, and Vicky the poodle. Timahoe caused some difficulty and was put in the care of the Cuban houseboy, Manolo, who spoke little English. Nixon asked for regular updates on the dog’s behavior and, on January 26, aide Alexander P. Butterfield wrote a reply. “I just had another long, agonizing and in-the-main unenlightening ‘conversation’ with Manolo,” he complained. “The next time you want some information on the subject of doggie affairs… I’m going directly to the dogs.”

The trio even came up during the Watergate hearings. Senators Russell and Mills revealed that they travelled at public expense above Air Force One. The public were appalled at the suggestion that the pooches should pay for their airfares and Russell came out swinging in reply. Realizing that he had offended dog lovers, he claimed that it was Nixon’s lawyers who had tried to make an issue out of it and thus “invaded the dog’s privacy” to begin with. Russell said, “If I could talk dog language I would urge that King Timahoe to chase [the lawyers] right out of the White House next time they appear on the scene. I understand that King Timahoe, Pascha and Vicky have had hang-dog looks since the unfortunate thing was blown out of proportion.”

But for my money, the most revealing thing about the dogs was Nixon’s affection for Vicky the poodle, who was a gift for his daughter Julie. I was raised with a poodle and would say that they are difficult dogs to love: highly intelligent but also stubborn and independent. It takes a certain kind of will to master and develop a relationship with a poodle, who can love you one minute then decide they’d rather raid the pantry and disappear the next. Nixon remains an illusive personality to the historian, but I suspect he would have appreciated that mix of canine loyalty with cat-like willfulness. Along with his incredible bibliophilia, love for very bad martial music, and flirtation with Catholicism, it’s one of the few clues we have as to what made the Trickster tick.

Tobacco built America

3/28/2011

Whatever ideology they might claim, when they get into government all parties want to govern as much as possible. Nowhere is that truer than in the field of public health, where left and rightwing movements have succumbed to the thrill of telling us how to live our lives for decades. Take tobacco. In the US, public smoking bans exist in 27 states (including Montana, Malboro Country). In the UK, the hilariously titled “Conservative” government wants to ban bright colors on cigarette packs. I was even told off for lighting up a cigar in a bar in Paris last month. Fortunately, I don’t speak French so I went ahead and did it anyway.

But government operates by the law of diminishing returns. Beyond a certain point, the social benefits of regulation begat new ills. The state’s desire to turn us all into yoghurt eating, fat avoiding Dolph Lundgrens will backfire when we’re all living into our hundreds and receipts from cigarette taxes have disappeared. Man is hotwired to destroy himself, and cigarette smoking can play a part in that natural cycle of self-annihilation.

And free market governments should bear something else in mind when thinking of banning the weed: tobacco built America. Jamestown was England’s first successful colony on American soil, but its survival was initially uncertain. From 1607-1611, it floundered from famine to epidemic and nearly disappeared off the map. It was rescued in 1611 when colonist John Rolfe experimented with planting some tobacco. By 1619, Jamestown had become a major commercial port, flourishing on sales of the demon weed to England. The industry brought political development as the colonists demanded self-government and control over duties. James I’s threat to ban it on health grounds stoked some early nationalist feeling. Meanwhile, John Rolfe played another big part in early American history by marrying local Amerindian Pocahontas. Alas, capitalism also laid the foundations for conflict between the Europeans and the Native Americans. Tired of having their land stolen for tobacco cultivation, the locals attacked Jamestown in 1622 and killed Rolfe. All progress comes at a price.

Today, tobacco is building new economies in South East Asia. Alas, the companies involved are not exactly model employers and their advertising techniques are scandalous. But life is complex, and individuals and nations cut deals with the devil all the time for the prospect of economic growth or a stolen moment of smoky bliss. For libertarians the world over, surely tobacco is the most potent symbol of the preference for liberty over security?

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