Searching for Meaning in Pop Rocks and Sideburns

My favorite moment on every episode of Gilligan’s Island or frankly any 60's sitcom is when Gilligan insists with unmitigatged defiance…

My favorite moment on every episode of Gilligan’s Island or frankly any 60's sitcom is when Gilligan insists with unmitigatged defiance that he won’t be bullied or cajoled into doing something he doesn’t want to do. “I won’t wear a dress. I won’t wear a dress. I won’t wear a dress.”

Flip instantly to Gilligan in a long evening gown and pearls. “Be brutal. How do I look?”

That’s how I was about moving back to the Valley. And I’ve now lived in Studio City for the past 17 years with no sign of leaving. Until a white shuttle whisks me to the nursing home which, invariably, will also have an 818 prefix.

Even as a child, I had a conflictual relationship to the Valley. I lived half my youth in Van Nuys, half my youth in Encino and all my youth in a state of “What the fuck am I doing here? I don’t care about motocross.”

After high school, I’d gone to college in New England. I worked in the ad game in the Bay Area. And eventually I lived in that hipster neighborhood between Beverly and Melrose where every guy wore suede, old school Pumas and was working on a Newsradio spec script. (Not sure if that dates the story at all?)

In any case, I surely wasn’t moving back to the home of liquor delis and porn shoots. A place where “culture” was going boys blowing up frogs they found near the little league field with M-80 firecrackers. A place where the dads seemed to outdo each other trying to dress like a shady record producer who’d rip off Rerun in every episode of What’s Happening.

All I remember about the girls is that they fastened their jeans in the back and wouldn’t talk to me. And the moms used to dress like Australian tennis phenom Evonne Goolagong. Oh, and wouldn’t talk to me.

Then I had a kid. And wanted to buy a house. So I checked the real estate section and my bank account. Then double checked it. 818 it is!

But something else had happened. Age and a virulent case of nostalgia had bestowed upon me enough distance and perspective to begin enjoying the Valley all its quirks. Especially revisiting the places (in person and in my mind) the places that had made it so qunitessentially Val.

Last week, I was listening to Lawrence Wright on Fresh Air — that alone at one time might have gotten you kicked out of the Valley for pretentious bookishness. Or at least tossed into the L.A. River weighed down by disco roller skates and Cheap Trick singles.

Where was I? Oh right, Lawrence Wright was speaking about his book, which covers his highly ambivalent relationship to Texas. It’s where he grew up and where he now again lives. (See the connection? If so, let me know what it is.)

Wright talks about the 3 stages of culture. In his case he was talking about Texas but it could refer to any place that one might not consider cosmopolitan and culturally refined.

There’s the first level which he describes as all the obvious signifiers of a place. For him, it was Cowboy hats. Guns. Bbq. Honky tonk music.

Second, is when people start going away and coming back with outside cultural influences. It’s when places try to be more mature and open their first philharmonics, operas and museums.

But the third level is when people are able to see through the obvious signifiers and make art about what makes their place special. To see the seemingly banal and find excitment in the specificity. In Texas that’s Beyoncé and Larry McMurtry, Richard Linklater and Wes Anderson,Steve Earle and Willie Nelson.

I think that’s where I am in regards to the Valley.

Trust me, I don’t think I’ve made great art. Just ask my therapist. But I’m now able to look at the home of my youth, a sea of hot dog joints and batting cages and bowling alleys and write about it with some detachment. As a specific time and place and culture.

It definitely wasn’t the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It wasn’t even the Westside of Los Angeles, with it’s burgeoning community of Post World War II German artist emigres.

It was a burgeoning suburb whose “culture” manifested itself in its miniature golf courses and pony rides. Indoor skating rinks and roadside tomato stands.

Lately, I’ve trying to figure out who I am by understanding the time and place that shaped me. I don’t think that’s uncommon for a writer of a certain age. It certainly makes sense when you factor in my losing a parent to suicide. Plus the complete disintegration of family of origin in the almost-immediate aftermath.

So, this interest in my upbringing has manifested itself in writing lots of articles about my youth.

And posting incessantly on a Facebook site about growing up in the Valley in the 70's and 80’s.

Doing so has helped trigger memories and details I’d long since tucked away.

Like our local station KTLA showing the same movie Japanese robot movie, Voyage Into Space, 5 nights a week. And my brother and I naturally watching it…5 nights a week.

Like my obsession with local wrestling from the Olympic Auditorium. This prompted me to make my own wrestling cards of Porkchop and John Tolos and Pampero Firpo.

Like riding my bike halfway across the Valley, just to watch Barbara Streisand’s boxing film, The Main Event. Twice. Which is only not embarassing because the Sergeant Pepper’s movie at the same theater. Three times.

Like getting home from these cross- Valley bike rides around sunset. Just in time to play pickup baseball on our cul de sac. (Yes, we lived on a cul de sac. And there were enough kids loitering in the street for a full baseball game.)

It’s funny I didn’t really fit into the Valley then. Nor do I entirely fit in these nostalgia Facebook sites.

I was quiet and bookish and Jewy at a time the Valley seemed overrun with blonde guys and girls tuning their Camaros. A recent post asked “Who used to get high at the Balboa Park parking lot. It was a non stop party.” Was it? I just remember the tee ball games.

It all felt a little provincial and unsophisticated, which it was. Maybe where you’re from is supposed to be. How else to measure how far you’ve come

But then you start to appreciate the nuance. Celebrate the silliness. Give disproportionate significance to the Weiner Factory. Or Flooky’s Batting cages. Or the time you saw Larry from Three’s Company eating noodles on Ventura Boulevard.

It’s also been fascinating to hear about people whose parents worked at the General Motors or Budweiser plants. Who met their spouses at the bar of the Ram’s Horn. Who did their shopping in Panorama City when it was the Beverly Hills of the Valley.

The Valley will never be Austin or Brooklyn. But artists have come from the Valley: Sally Field, Susan Sontag, Paul Thomas Anderson, Adam Carolla, Mare Winningham, Val Kilmer, Bad Religion, Sandra Tsing Loh, Todd Haynes, Kevin Spacey. Lisa Cholodenko went to my little elementary school. Even Frank Zappa made Valley-ness part of their artistic identity.

And as the Valley has shifted in one generation from a white flight bedroom suburb to a minority majority mini metropolitan area, heavily Latino et al, expect there to be even expression of time and place and culture.

Some days it seems like a fool’s errand or a time suck to spend so much time researching, analyzing, debating old little photos, class pictures, menus from north of Vanowen pizza joints.

I frequently drive by the first house I lived in on Louise at Sherman way in Van Nuys. I look there. I look at the park a couple houses up. Like my staring at them will tell me what I felt like when I was there. And can explain why I feel the way I do now.

I’ve often felt like people who grew up in the New Jersey/ New York area had it lucky. With such a carefully defined sense of place. With its open highways and boardwalks. Or its stickball games and seltzer water and lady hitting a cowbell in Ebbets Field.

But really those places aren’t more. Or better. It’s just the artists who’ve lived shout out their experiences louder. With more bravado.

Because every place has it details.

Lately I’ve been finding meaning in the taco stands and the pinball arcades and trampoline places. Finding artistry in hot dog shacks and pony rides and go kart venues and postwar tiki bars. Finding answers in Wacky Packs and The Love Boat and the Paul Lynde Halloween Special.

It’s story I need to tell, for my own health and sanity and creative satisfaction. So, I’ll keep digging. I know it’s out there. Somewhere between Mulholland and the 118.