Page 186 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

180 CULTURAL STUDIES

neighbors. On my better days I would like to believe that such nights foreshadow
the kind of grassroots, neighborhood-based organizing and politicking that might
somehow allow us to reclaim our culture from the Fortune 500; then again, it
would be just as easy to argue that such nights exemplify why the Left is where
it is, why professional music promoters and organizers rule the world, and why,
first and foremost, I should get the hell out of rock & roll.
The paradox I’m trying to outline here, of the magic of the music taking over
and providing a glimmer of transcendence—or at least momentary catharsis—
amidst the numbing wreckage of everyday life, is expressed with terrifying
brilliance in Paul Evans’ ‘Los Angeles, 1999’. Evans’ contribution to Present
Tense is its only piece of fiction and, along with Jeff Calder’s autobiographical
essay to be discussed below, one of the collection’s most engaging pieces of
reading. Indeed, Evans’ story presents a prophetic postmodern apocalypse that is
structured, much like Sartre’s The Reprieve or Robert Altman’s films, around
shards and fragments of character sketches that slowly interweave, eventually
bringing unimagined force to bear on each other’s story. Evans’ cast includes
‘the bad rappers’ of Compton scorching the freeways, ‘stupid Gary’ playing
screaming guitar clichés down in the plastic pre-fab hell of the valley suburbs,
the tortured alienation of ‘Father Diego’ in the barrio, ‘Lorretta May Brown’, an
alcoholic would-be star seeking refuge in LA from the slow, creeping rural death
of the deep South, and ‘Baby Catherine, the first baby born at the end of the
world’:
No dumb college for Baby Catherine, no sad job for this little sister, no
stale gum to chew, no telephone calls, no clothes to buy, no drugs, no
therapy, no endless search for love, the search so hard it’s like stepping on
razors, like bashing your head again and again and again on rock. None of
that noise, and Baby knew it. She saw love coming on strong in fireball
fury, in a deep and sudden kiss. Just love and love only at the end of the
world.
If Baby is the electric seer, the loving foreteller of the end of the world, then the
godhead of destruction, the strung-out hyped-up burned-out bringer of the big
one is ‘Solo Jones’, a cancer-ridden DJ whose every selection is ‘another bulletin
from his percolating soul—one more private fuck-the-programmer’s-playlist
song for his people’. Solo is one of those forgotten cultural treasures, a living
museum stocked with tunes from ‘Monk, Trane, St.Louis Armstrong, Johnny
Ray, Little Richard, Ronnie Spector, Sweet Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran,’ and
so on—i.e., all the spirits and life-givers and tellers of truth whose impassioned
sounds rip the bullshit veneer from ‘Parents, The ratfuck FCC, Mothers Against
Drunk Driving, Advertisers, Radio call-in psychologists, Buttinskis, The Dream
Police.’
Evans’ essay is brilliant. I imagine that if you read it before the other essays in
Present Tense, then there simply won’t be any reason to read on; if, like me, you