Dave Hickey, 'The Price of Everything' (Oct 2011)
… Today, looking back, it is amazing to me how externalized the culture of that tropical metropolis was—how heavily its emphasis fell on civilizing the weed-strewn, arid wilderness of Southern California. This was a new world that required new accouterments. So the painters were abstract classicists like John McLaughlin and Frederick Hammersley. Writers, poets and artists from Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg to Peter Voulkos looked to Asian civilization for spiritual, philosophical, and design agendas. It was a time when most of the intellectual population looked forward to California becoming a Pacific culture, with emphasis on the pacific. The heroes were architects and designers, Frank Lloyd Wright and his son, Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, John Lautner, and the Eameses, Charles and Ray.
People talked about inventor-designers like Steve Baer, father of the “zome,” a strategy of asymmetrical architecture. They talked about George Barris, whose custom cars would reconfigure Detroit product and prefigure its future. They talked about Tom Morely, the Wernher von Braun of surfing, whose concave-tipped boards would ultimately influence the aerodynamic design of jet-age aircraft. In this sense, even surfing was part of the civilizing urge: to draw a line, as fine as Ingres, on a translucent wall of water rising up above your head; to decorate the raw power of nature, make it beautifully to beach, and transit the pure intersection of nature and culture.
Surprisingly our crowd didn’t talk much about the movies except as “the industry,” where short-term jobs were available for artists, musicians, writers and designers. This intermittent work (there was a lot of it) sustained a large jazz establishment devoted to “cool,” with icons like Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Bud Shank, and Chico Hamilton, most of whom could write music and read it, most of whose improvisations aspired to delicacy and nuance rather than “gut.” One night at the Lighthouse my dad introduced me to the great lyrical drummer Chico Hamilton. I asked Hamilton about the absence of hard bop anger in Los Angeles music. The ever-dapper Hamilton, talking street, which he was anything but, told me that nobody but an asshole would pretend to be angry when he wasn’t. “I’m playing music, writing music, recording music, and paying my bills, so why should I be angry? When they remind me I’m a nigger, I tell them I’m the future of being a nigger.”
Hamilton’s droll remark touches on the deep reserves of decorum that everyone presumed were necessary to live in Los Angeles—reserves that one may still detect in Ken Price’s manner—the Zen permissiveness, the beatific tolerance, the disinclination to go on about one’s inner feelings. Living, as we did, out on the edge of the world, one guess about how one should feel was as good as another. I remember my little sister, who was maybe in the fourth grade at the time, remarking casually over dinner that “those nudists who live down the street are pretty cool.” Nobody blinked, since my sister worshipped Esther Williams, who lived in a mansion a tier below us on the Palisade, so we could watch the shining Esther in her scanties swimming away in her turquoise pool. That was Pacific Palisades at the time, a posh slum, with nice houses around the edges overlooking Sunset Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway.
Inland, there were tract houses, convenience stores, patches of raw desert, clumps of brush, and verdant gullies full of hideouts and strange fauna of the sort kids love. Above us the sky dwarfed everything, even the ocean, and the atmosphere itself was not a space but a live void, a particulate ambience full of dust and water within which everything blurred together and glowed. Palm trees shimmed in the sun-shot mist, and below us and always in our sight was the domain of the surf, the beach edged by crinkled cliffs, coves, and tidal pools, where waves that ranged from insulting in their tininess to butt-clenching in their lofty acceleration deposited foam, soup, scum, slime, mud, and whatever dead things showed up—mostly sharks, jellyfish, and starlets, as I remember. So you stood on those beaches facing this liquid wasteland sweeping out to the Orient, an ocean away but still closer, somehow, than the chilly woodlands of New England. Behind you, the human infestation of artifacts and architecture spread inland, gradually losing the ambience of the edge without establishing much else in the way of presence.
