Читать книгу Hollywood to Vienna - Donald Ellis Rothenberg - Страница 16

Jesse now is walking down the street, in the heat, or maybe even in heat. The spring day pushes him into the woods, the Vienna Woods. He thinks he hears an orchestra. Who was here before? Is this colorful enough, the language matching the real scene? The book The Waves by Virginia Woolf is a good illustration of this. “Hey, yo, boy, are you talking to me?” Jesse is a little crazy, caught inside society’s blues, the madness of life in today’s impersonal world. The focal point in living in the here-and-now is ever-present in creating our mutual reality, in unison with the waves, magnetic and electronic, the techno-beat of the final scene of a Saturday in Vienna and the shopping street where art and fashion and design and music and color and fabric and people play, lying awake at the feet of prospective buyers. It’s really a large, quiet village, with the age-old and modern interplaying something mauve.

The shops are full, and a Swedish fashion store buys and sells, puts the beat in the air ear via speakers, even opens your purse for you. It’s a never-ending string of stores and coffee in open-air cafes, the oranges and intense greens this season’s rendition by whoever it is who decides what colors people are wearing each year. Variations on a theme, with the blacks and whites still in. The advertising keeps time to the photographer’s click, the upscale layout and black and white images looking everyday, and yet slick and inviting . . . buy, buy, buy . . .

This is the first time this god forsaken new technological machine is put to good use, this invention of the human mind designed to confuse all the fools into thinking they’re so smart and no longer have to interact with nature.

Begin to type the story of the history of Western civilization: the secular humanists and the born-agains, reigning over their next of kin as the neo-nazi world plays havoc on the internet, much of it coming from America, proclaiming freedom of speech while often espousing hatred and xenophobia, racism and bigotry. The fundamentalists of the world, uniting in restricting freedom and espousing their dogmatic gospel as The Truth for all to see and act upon, or else. The network of men rebelling with glee, the rape of the Earth, all of the work the money-man madness has begun and shipped overseas, the Islamic revolution/terrorists and the billions of Chinese and Indians wanting the “capitalist pot,” the Italians’ ever-changing their new governments for more than sixty years. Will there even be another millennium? No, says Stephen Hawking.

I suggest we get down to business and be friendly to each other . . . Will we allow ourselves to open up and play?

There was this time when the set was still standing in the studios and the backdrop was barren, the walls still there, the wooden framing, cowboy-generic Hollywood Main Street, baking in the California sun as the cowboys rolled onto the set on their horses chasing the American Indians to the nearest bingo casino onto the reservations and playing the money game, no extremes too deadly to inherit the Earth, no companies too friendly to dump uranium waste into unsuspecting Native American lungs. And Agent Orange used in Vietnam. Viruses may have been created in the chemical disease control research centers, where AIDS could have had its origins. The fun stopped a long time ago, even after Desert Storm or Bosnia, Kosovo, Middle East, African poverty and grief, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Darfur, Turkmenistan, Burma, Lebanon, Israel, North Korea and other ever-present hot spots, making the world safe again for our heroes on both ends of the political spectrum.

Jesse, you’re no fool. You traveled to the South US of A to register blacks in the voting-rights days, the days of civil rights and the blacklists. The KKK had a field day, and the Confederate Flag sometimes flies in Austria, and the Harley-Davidson commercialism rolls right onto the latest T-shirt. Hogs and bravado fighting on in Sweden and other branches of Hells Angels.

Funny the tidbits picked up in word-print, that facsimile of the world’s events, reported and written and edited and censored and then proclaimed as the news of the world, news-bites or newsbytes, the hard disc purring along. Now the sacred gurus are having a convention at the expensive club on the other side of the tracks, free lunches handed out on Central Avenue in Korea Town, and in Boyle Heights where the grandparents came and settled into the last bastion of Jewish ghetto in L.A. It’s all one big gentrification now, with building developers, insurance companies, and HMO’s on parade, next to the latest anti-depressant, the newest pills to research a cure, the latest drug to entice or to facilitate an erection. The guns-and-roses mentality, conglomerates controlling entertainment airwaves until we call in our “acting out” brains. The continuum concept is alive and well in self-hate, lack of self esteem and self confidence, the outer layer exposed and hiding underlayers of madness. The persona, the intimate man, the loving woman, the fate of us all in the balance . . . and on and on . . .