Bob Jones is balding, but still proud of his long, wavy ponytail. Stay in school, he tells the kids, don’t ever open up a comic-book shop. Behind the counter, he watches them, to make sure they don’t steal any magic cards, or take too long reading comics they won’t buy. Do you have an older…
The gray majesty of a valley mall at sunset
Picture by Marc Trujillo
Written about by TC Boyle and Brett Easton Ellis, sung about by Xiu Xiu and Fear, the Valley seems to be the place that a generation of parents escaped to and their kids must escape from, as if the need for escape were a genetic trait, passed- down and unavoidable like having a big nose or the ability to go bald. To someone of my generation (born late ’80s/early ’90s) the Valley is a negative space; its content’s made of the ghosts of all that those who moved there gave up. It is the image of what my parents’ and my peers’ parents thought they wanted, or, more accurately, what they were willing to settle for, and it’s that legacy of having settled, of being a second- generation second best, that gives the valley c. 2003- 2007 its unique, re-inventive energy. It is a place of intense shame covered up with strenuous self- mythologizing, a place where kids idolized gangsters and drug dealers. Where the children of frustrated artists bought speed off of unemployable college-graduates. Though it can be as humorless as sunlight on an SUV or as alien as a grid of twinkling lights, for me the valley will always be the stage-set for a past that, no matter how I try to mute its influence with ridicule, still affects my style. It’s the mid 2000s, in parents’ houses, malls, parks, and bad venues. It’s the sad earnestness of bands with names like Against Empire and Angel City Outcasts, pre- ironic tight pants, tall cans of MGD, and girls in so much makeup that for one odd moment in time they all looked the same. When I try to imagine “the valley,” it’s always 3 am or 3 pm, there’s always the lights of a 7-11 or the matte flag of a Thrifty gas station, and the only things to do are those we know we shouldn’t. If the valley tasted like anything I think it would taste like a Taco Bell crunch wrap and a Starbucks frapuccino, with a hint of Franzia. Its smell would be the smell of the inside of a 7-11, by the magazine racks, at night, when the only other thing you can smell is beer from someone else’s lips. The experience of the valley is that of hanging out with the people that are left when you’ve rejected everyone else; it’s feeling misunderstood and angry and not knowing why. It’s the self- importance of “warrior- poets” who invent epic gang battles for their high-school friends to have starred in. I think this might be the essential thing about the valley; it’s a place that forces you into movement, a place of obvious incompleteness. The endless expanses of half- built malls and condominium complexes far too new to feel welcoming act as the physical equivalent of the gauache longing that makes kids drive around in circles, change their hair color all the time, and invent futures for themselves, in other places, that year- by- year recede; there is always a “plan,” you’re going to move to SF and start a band, to NY and publish your poems, to Israel and join the army; you’re just waiting until you have a little more money, a little more time, but soon… these plans can turn into literal pipe- dreams, and become exactly what keeps you where you are–in the Valley.
Sue Webster & Tim Noble
picture by Lise Sarfati
A drop of water will follow the path where another drop has been. She points the hair- dryer at the mirror, its muzzle toward the image of her face, pulls the trigger and the droplets flee, like roaches from a light. Eyebrows tweeze, liner, shadow, and maybe it’s today. The window leaks a cold pale color, and would it be today the news came through? Certain words, they make her shiver now: weird ones, like “rendition,” and “enfilade.” “MIA,”s no singer now, but a call to arrhythmia.
You check the physical mailbox, about once a day. Sometimes early and it’ll be empty still. Shut it and turn the key. Eleven others, for the building. Wonder. Try not to think of each life as a sculpture finished; caressed an inch at a time by a blind critic but finished, finished at birth. Sometimes there’ll be rejections, or coupons. Oil change for the car you don’t have. Men’s pants, half- off. You long for hierarchy; want, desperate, for people to think your life matters to them, but also for your life to actually matter. To help someone; to help him, but what you’ve got’s a lot of hate, and hate helps? What? Your parents? Still, you think, watching a flyer spiral to the ground. Inside, the cat rubs your shin with his face. You still hate them for not being secretly rich and famous. You wished you were an orphan, whose real parents were spies or wizards. The cat, Severin, flips his dish over and pushes it, with his paw. You could almost have been a doctor by now. You still couldn’t have saved him.
Bleach, where the mold was, and steam where there was air. My body’s shadow on the tile wall looks like a French cartoon. Inspector Clouseau. Pain, and no prizes. Loving someone, if you love them really, whom wouldn’t you destroy to get them back? All these people ruining the world, what if they aren’t doing it for themselves?
Lise Sarfati
Finally a car approached and passed. Then nothing again. A buzzard on a fencepost. Single windmill in the distance. Everything here was in the distance. Distance was the salient fact. Even after you reached something, you were inmersed in distance. It didnt end until the mountains and he wasnt going that far.
— Running dog. John DeLillo. (via dada)
