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THE URBAN MAN FOR KCRW, JAN. 5, 2009

The Necessary Bureaucracy

by Marc Porter Zasada

Tonight I want to tell you about the kiss of a beautiful woman.

It was, I assure you, exquisite.

But first we have a little bureaucracy to complete: There’s the necessary discussion of which movie to see and the search for the car keys in the pockets of five different jackets; there’s the decision about how to decide where to eat and the environmental impact report about what to order. Before we get to the romantic after-stroll along a rain-shiny street outside the Pacific Theater in Culver City; before we witness the beautiful woman’s face lit briefly in neon or watch her turn her collars against the wind, we have to attend the hearings and file the papers.

Okay, I know you’d rather hear that the Urban Man knows how to evade red tape: that the moment was unplanned; that the kiss broke all the rules. I know you’d prefer not to hear it occurred in an actual redevelopment zone created by re-invested tax funds for the very purpose of inspiring romantic moments. I know that sounds unromantic. And I’m sure you don’t want to know that the woman was, in fact…my wife.

In short, as in a song, I know you’d rather I cut to the nugget of experience, the crucial two seconds of genuine affection embedded in the lengthy effort and tortured regulations of life. I mean, if there’s one thing Angelenos hate, it’s bureaucracy.

Here in the city of dreams, we dream that life will be unnegotiated and direct. We don’t make movies about cops who follow departmental directives, we make movies about cops who punch people in the gut. We don’t make movies about marriage, we make movies about love. You might call the “unbureaucratic moment” the basis of the whole “entertainment capital of the world” concept—a dream we dream on behalf of the whole planet.

“Hey,” you may say to the Urban Man, “Don’t let the process become more important than the result. Just get to the damn kiss.”

But lo, dear listener, I’m sorry to say that in this case, as in most cases, the process itself—the choice of who would drive and in what part of the theater we would sit—was crucial to the denouement. Without the process, there would have been no kiss. Maybe not even without the redevelopment zone. As a responsible journalist, I should spare you none of the tedious detail. I should not allow you to imagine that real life is so simple as a movie. I should not claim, as the Beatles claimed, that “All you need is love.”

Actually, besides love, I’ve found you need about 36 other things—but fortunately, even as we speak, I’ve been moving the paperwork along and keeping my eyes on the prize. Already, I’ve checked in the glove compartment to make sure the car insurance was up to date and I’ve filed away much of the greasy and overpriced meal in a takeaway box. The two of us have finalized the, in the end, lengthy hearings about where to sit in the theater (I like the back, my wife the precise center). I swear that soon we’ll be done parsing and criticizing the movie as tediously episodic—and we can finally move out of the lobby and onto the still-wet street.

In fact…hang on, hang on…the wait is almost over. The Urban Man sees the kiss arriving even now. It comes in fits and starts, traced by little flashes down along Culver Boulevard. If you look carefully, you can see these flashes are generated by eager headlights and distant lightning, leftover holiday decorations and the faces of passersby illuminated briefly in their cell phones. The rain has stopped but the air remains damp. Tires hiss. The beautiful woman closes her own phone. She turns….