Loitering: New and Collected Essays (17 page)

This is tricky terrain, the transition from the airy intensity of the imagination to the denser inspissations of reality. In his writings on the web Santos so often leaves sense for sound, so often eases away from the meaning of a word for the music it will make and abandons practicality for the pleasing image, that his real project seems to be about the liberation of language,
about words loosed from their context, about poetry. (In a passage I really like, he writes that the pilots of these skybikes “use dust devils as the lift of last resort. You kamikaze into them, treetop high, and hope to rise enough to catch a big convection cell . . . too big, you dement into a winged blue Popsicle.”) In this context Santos reminds me of the French utopian Charles Fourier, and both men are closer to the
furor poeticus
of Plato than they are to a hard-minded historian like Marx or a more sober utopian like Robert Owen. Fourier believed the world would eventually contain thirty-seven million poets equal to Homer, thirty-seven million mathematicians equal to Newton, and thirty-seven million dramatists equal to Molière—although, he admitted, these were only “approximate estimates.” He believed there were 810 psychological types and organized his
phalanstères
to include two of each. He believed in nearly complete sexual liberation—sadism, masochism, sodomy, homosexuality, pederasty, bestiality, fetishism, and sex between close relatives—and he also believed that salt would one day leech from the seas and that those seas would in turn become oceans of lemonade.

Some of what Santos is up to might be called Art Brut, although in its American form, as Outsider Art, its
appreciation contains a quotient of irony and class snobbery or condescension that has always bothered me. Plus, Santos doesn’t strictly qualify—too much training, as a sculptor and muralist, and too much savvy, too much awareness of his renegade role in relation to the gallery world. He’s something of a pisser, resistant to art rather than naïvely unaware of its trends, so perhaps the uppercase label that suits him best is Marginal Art. At any rate, Biosquat has some of the Art Brut stuff—its materials are humble, it’s the work of a solitary devoted soul, it’s eccentric and enigmatic, it’s being undertaken in near total disregard of public opinion—and one day it may resemble the Watts Towers or the Palais Idéal. Biosquat is packed with thought, text-like, and its themes—cycling, nomadism, trash worship, solar power—touch everything from the fences to the toilets. The toilet I used, for instance, is your traditional white porcelain seat mounted on a trike, and when you’re done, you toss in some mulch (not lime, which, Santos says, just turns the waste into a bunch of brick turds), and then periodically the whole contraption is inched forward, leaving in its trail a swath of fertilizer suitable for gardening. In a couple places around the property there were also pissoirs fashioned out of plastic Clorox bottles, from which the bottoms had been snipped, and black hoses that then ran into beds of wood chips, the exact agro-purpose of
which escaped me, but had something to do, I imagine, with urine’s nitrogen content. The emunctory enthusiasms of people in eco-villages, always fiddling with their waste, might make for an interesting study, but meanwhile the tricycle toilet at Biosquat worked wonderfully. It didn’t stink at all, a claim I’d seriously doubted when Dave Santos first mentioned it, and crapping alfresco is always nice.

One of the laws of Biosquat, it seemed, was that nothing could be what it was originally. The gnat goggles were made from the screens of a tea infuser; to the fat ends of a set of chopsticks Santos had fixed, on one, a tablespoon, and on the other, a toothbrush. He called this general category of transformation “mutant technology.” Some of these transformations—especially the bikes—are right in the grain of a particular brand of American genius that flourished in the years following World War II. This genius centered around car culture, and the era probably reached its meridian in Southern California, in the fifties and sixties, waning somewhat by the 1970s. Dave Santos isn’t all that different in spirit from a SoCal gearhead like Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, automotive designer and visionary, creator of Rat Fink, who pioneered the use of fiberglass in car bodies and was a guru/hero to the legions of boys who built scale models of his hot rods—the Outlaw, the Beatnik
Bandit, the Mysterion—and any shade-tree mechanic who had an aesthetic bone aching in his body. Roth was celebrated in Tom Wolfe’s seminal early essay “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” and even today his legacy of transformed, souped-up, mutant machines hasn’t entirely gone away. The idea of an utterly reworked kick-ass car is still amply evident among the Hispanic boys who cruise Hollywood Boulevard on Friday nights, although in the main that lexicon has gone out of the life of white kids (those who don’t live in Barstow or Bakersfield or Stockton, anyway).

Now auto shop’s dead, and probably hipsters study art, anyway, but back in the day a certain, perhaps limited manhood made its way into public by lovingly (and literally) deconstructing one of the culture’s main givens—the car—and metamorphosing it with saws and torches, complex paints and layers of lacquer, until it shed its dull utility and became art—primarily, as Wolfe says, sculpture. (Roth cast the bodies of his bizarro cars with plaster molds.) It’s no accident that this kind of revamping flourishes in macho cultures, since it’s so openly about the male need of outlets for sensitivity that aren’t permissible and are, in fact, studiously removed from spectacles like football. In an essay quite similar in gist to Wolfe’s, Dave Hickey argues that hot-rodding
is about dissent, which I think is partially true. Hispanics in LA, for example, often favor hopped-up trucks, in part to recoup and then triumph over the denigrations of migrant labor life, spent riding around dusty fields, packed in the backs of pickups like loads of produce. The very qualities that make a truck functional for farmwork—beefy suspension, extra clearance, etc.—are completely subverted in a lowrider, which couldn’t handle even the slightest rut without high-centering or fatally bashing the rocker panels. Lowriders are so outrageously spiffy and cool—a new dandyism—they look like they’ve never done a day of work in their lives.

And just so, Dave Santos’s bikes are ridiculous from the standpoint of utility. Everything an elite rider might want for the Tour de France—lightness, strength, balance, low resistance—is out the window once Santos fires up his torch and begins to build a mutant bike for his migratory trips to Mexico: lengthening the seat tubes by a couple of feet, raising the bottom brackets, setting the chain rings and cranks on a vertical axis, chopping the forks, making the saddles cushy with wads of foam and a wrap of duct tape, improvising fairings of plaster and fabric. They aren’t conventionally beautiful, these bikes, and they don’t even seem roadworthy—they’re circus bikes for goofy, toppling clowns—but in their strange, abstracted state they’re
definitely objects, maybe sculptures. Everything Dave Santos does at Biosquat is an attempt to render a vivid interior external, and as such, his bikes are primarily an index to the visionary mind of the maker. But the central problem with any visionary experience, plaguing all seers, is one of verification. I’m not talking about vision as an eyeball thing (
Did you see that?
), but vision as imagination, intuition, revelation (
Did you experience that?
), where issues of authenticity, truth, and validity (
Are you nuts?
) become hugely problematic—for example, when you’re talking about winged bikes, fitted with feathers of old, still utile trash, that might one day carry hippies to the stratosphere.

At one point Santos said he was fascinated by “those little golden ages that are gone before you know it.” But he also said: “That’s where I’m a little pessimistic, because sometimes cultures reach a peak and they don’t just keep on going forever, you know—then there’s ruins, and thousands of years, and, you know, after ancient Greece, they had a lot of downtime, the action went somewhere else. So there’s a lot of sadness, a lot of missed opportunities, a lot of mistakes.” Biosquat aspires to get outside this story. It’s an attempt at creating some kind of suspension, anyway—a world of signs and wonders, of marvels and revelations, of continuous amazement. How? Every object at Biosquat is tinkered
with until it’s an original, toyed with until it resembles nothing else. Even Santos’s fondness for neologisms is a way of wrenching old words into something new and unique. I’d never seen a toothbrush on a chopstick—it’s so Dada and sensible at the same time—nor had I taken a shit on a trike. Each object—like Big Daddy Roth’s hot rods or the Hispanic boys’ chopped and channeled trucks—is an attempt to seize life at a moment of glory, to embody an essence and hold it, stilling the ephemeral, apotheosizing what would otherwise pass, as all things pass. The mutant bikes, the bamboo beds, the gnat goggles and the Chicano robots and the corrugated plastic domes are all singular—freaky, a one-off, an aberrance, a whole world of exceptions. All of it exists somewhere beyond sadness or mistakes or missed opportunities, because, transformed, there’s nothing to compare it to. It’s meant to speak to you in the language of the burning bush, it’s supposed to be a walk on water, it’s all truth of another order, as William James says, like the coin Christ pulls from the mouth of the fish to pay the temple tax. These are called miracles, of course, and they break a lot of natural laws, but as transformations, utterly singular, beyond argument, they too are meant to convince you that the kingdom has already arrived, here on Earth.

1
My questions and exclamations—every noise I made—appear here within brackets.

Orphans

The intent of a façade is exoteric but there are obvious problems with that. While in St. Petersburg, for instance, I stayed for several days at the Moscow Hotel. That particular exterior does the work of a façade, presenting a warren of windows so relentlessly uniform the eye is baffled and ultimately rejected; from a distance, you can’t quite locate the entrance. But if, from outside, you can’t find a way in, from inside, especially walking the hallways, you can’t imagine a way out. The interior space is made of incredibly long, horrid corridors lined on either side with black doors, like answers to a question you’d long ago forgotten. You feel exhausted, seeing such a dreary path ahead of you on the way to your room. You begin to feel the life behind any one of the
black doors will do—any future, any destiny. Once inside, your room, it turns out, is only the imitation of something nice, an arrangement of resemblances.

And probably the most esoteric Russian encounter is with a woman seated inside a glass booth. You look through thick Plexiglas, you speak into a small vent or round hole, and the grim interior light from a low-watt lamp, the dull brown walls, the sense of the woman as someone seated at the bottom of a box, all of this seems to encourage her indifference, embolden it. Everything inside—the adding machine or cash register, the telephone, the woman’s lips—looks antiquated. You may want to exchange money or call a cab or simply make an inquiry, but you are clearly intruding on an isolation that’s sanctioned or bolstered, somehow, by an official boredom. What sense of desire or anticipation can you expect from a woman locked away like this, limited to such a small immobilizing space? It seems to be a matter of perfect indifference whether or not you have rubles to spend or the question you want to ask is ever answered. It’s like tricking a troll, hoping for passage. If you can consider a façade the blank face, then the woman inside the glass booth is the hardened heart, neither of them inclined to charm. Their efficacy comes from elsewhere. You can’t imagine the liberation of such a woman, from
either her booth or her boredom, and the information you’re after is isolated too, like a dwindling, rationed commodity, lacking market efficiency and flow. In my limited experience, you never came away from one of these occult encounters with enough of what you were after. The arrangement is tightfisted, as though ideas and information weren’t meant to circulate, as if they could actually be contained inside what amounted to aquariums. You look into that glass booth long enough and what you begin to see, I imagine, is your own soul.