Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [146]
Previously Unpublished, November 1980
California
California has become so easy to kick around in the last few years you almost hesitate to join the snot-chained mob. It does absolutely nothing to redeem itself, but the virulence of our scorn ultimately reflects nothing so much as the quashed ineluctable admission that our New York cartoon is just about as bad. Like when I talked to my nephew in San Diego, who works in a roller-skate store, on the phone a few months back and he said, “Yeah, I know what Manhattan's like. I’ve seen all those Woody Allen movies.”
You know something? I hate Woody Allen worse than anybody in the whole state of California. Woody Allen (with some help from Neil Simon, the media in general, and myself and most of the rest of the population of Edward K.'s12 provincial little burg) has turned me into a second-class citizen. I’m not like that, I want to scream, but it's too late—I know my nephew's not a hot-tubular biofed granola cruncher because I knew him when we were both chillen and he hated everything even then, just like me, but it was me what up ‘n’ moved to this place where the streets are paved with gold and the Great White Way even goes out of its way to mount productions celebrating the virtues of minority groups—with one conspicuous exception, that is. I mean, can you imagine a B’way hit entitled Marin's a Groove After All? No. We hate, and thus are hated. Which serves us right, since there really is nothing going on anywhere else, except, damn, with so little going on here, how ‘bout some recognition on the part of the rest of the nation that we frenzofried Nyawkers are as vacant and bewildered as the last leisure suit in Keokuk?
Nope, it's never gonna happen: we’ve been too snotty too long. We’ve bought our death, and the best we can say is that we’re enjoying it (as opposed to Keokuk, which remains largely unmoved by the brand of irony stamped in the genes of anybody who's ever been knocked down in the subway by an ostensible human which could pass for their grandmother. Only here, not Keokuk, not nowhere else, do grannies become Charles Bronson death-units grinding up the tracks atcha. Or so we have been led to believe by popular folklore.) Last night my shrink concluded our session by saying, “Go home and do something positive!” I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He cured cancer (literally) in a patient the other day. I stare at the wall, pore over TV Guide as if the thirty-fifth reread of the day's skeds will reveal some cinematic gem I unaccountably missed instead of more reruns of The Love Boat in the middle of long nights getting longer when you’re afraid to call anybody because you don’t want to wake them up even though in reality they’re all doing ‘zackly what you’re doing, making their peace with Mary Tyler Moore and the nine-thousandth rerun of General MacArthur's lifetime on Biography, so you have a whole city crammed with pathetic wretches lonelified out of their skulls but cowering before their phones because they actually believe that somebody else around this amphetamine skillet occasionally sleeps!
Yep, it's a great joke all right, but don’t expect anybody else to get it. Like right after the “positive” bit my shrink (who really does understand me, it's just he refuses to support my eternal Will To Do Nothing) says, “Well, what gives you pleasure?”
“Pleasure?” I stare at him bug-eyed, repeat the word with amazement. He swears it's true, but reader, can any of you actually tell much less substantiate for me that there is such a thing extant hither or whither yon as “pleasure”? Sensation, yes. Relief from anxiety, certainly, if you’re lucky. But pleasure? That's almost as big a canard as
“happiness.” All these things, of course, are tissues constructed from straws randomly plucked from the wind and