HOME PAGE

THE URBAN MAN FOR KCRW, OCT. 23, 2006

Public Beauty, Part IV

By Marc Porter Zasada

If you listen to this show, you know that the Urban Man often tries to find beauty in what many consider an ugly town. Not the beauty of Bel Air backyards or the isolated wonders of superstar architecture…that would be too easy. No, I mean the beauty of stucco minimalls, of tract housing, of tangled overpasses.

It’s a tough job, but I do my homework.

For example, last year I went to see the South Central dance movie Rize, which included the oiled bodies of Angelenos gyrating exquisitely in the graffiti-encrusted bed of the L.A. River. It wasn’t just beauty in a storm drain, but beauty of the storm drain, as if, as many believe, there were some authentic symphony which could be heard only among graffitied walls.

And I saw that yes, if “truth is beauty and beauty truth,” then even the L.A. River, processed with proper video techniques, could be considered magnificent.

And I went to the Natural History Museum when it mounted an exhibit called L.A. Light/Motion/Dreams, where they used dramatic music and kaleidoscopic lenses to make rusty chain link fences and late afternoon traffic jams seem like cosmic revelations.

Unfortunately, back outside, I couldn’t quite see it that way as I transitioned from the 110 to the 101.

But the other day at a local party, I met a true expert in beauty. His name is Raiford Rogers and he has his own modern ballet company. He can sculpt, you know, a perfect line.

I learned that last spring, Rogers and his wife Anne Trelease went looking for loveliness in the real L.A. They mounted a camera on a car and Anne drove very slowly among modest bungalows and nail salons. She shot sincere auto parts shops, crowds of Korean signage, and murals of vegetables on the walls of Mexican markets. She caught late sunlight on dusty landscaping, scruffy palmettos in front of industrial warehouses, and of course…parking lots. A film editor added Bach in the background, then Rogers showed his video on a huge screen, and populated the stage below with his own graceful dancers.

Those who were there said it was almost as if the inhabitants of L.A. had all become lithe.

Naturally, I begged Rogers for a DVD—and for a week, I watched this gorgeous vision obsessively on my laptop, four or five times a day. I thought: “Maybe I can retrain my eyes, and if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, maybe I won’t see L.A. as ugly anymore.”

At last, this afternoon, I decide I’m ready to solo. I jump in my car, head for Rampart Division and go walk along Alvarado near Wilshire.

Here are swap meets with loud plastic toys, luggage joints, donut shops, discount dentists, pawnbrokers, and large women selling tight t-shirts. The street is littered, but yes, full of light and motion.

And sure enough, for a few glorious minutes, I squint my eyes and picture it with Bach in the background. Pedestrians pass like brightly-costumed dancers. And I wonder, is this the true L.A., as Rogers assured me, “beautiful because it’s authentic?”

Alas the illusion doesn’t hold for long. I’ve neglected to bring even an iPod to keep the Bach flowing, and after two or three minutes, it becomes just “Alvarado Boulevard:” noisy, smoggy, and unredeemed.

And I think, maybe the Urban Man just hasn’t been at this game long enough. Maybe the next generation of local citizens will have to make this critical genetic leap. Maybe some future crop of Angelenos, retrained from birth by music videos and kaleidoscopic lenses, will be capable of wandering down the boulevards, even with naked eyes and ears, and find L.A. beautiful.

Note: The film backdrop for the ballet known as “Transcription” was a collaboration between Raiford Rogers and his wife Anne Trelease, a local architect. Editor Mark Bowen transformed the video into the final piece, which relates in a most clever manner to Bach’s Chaconne in D minor. “Transcription” premiered in L.A. and was also performed in New York at the new Alvin Aley Cityroup Theater in June 2006.