Concrete and Dust: Mapping the Sexual Terrains of Los Angeles

Jeanine Marie Minge, Amber Lynn Zimmerman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415808439
• eBook ISBN: 9781136159916
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Concrete and Dust focuses on the performative nature of sexualized identity in Hollywood, the people that live in its underbelly and surrounding valleys, the sexual geographies of the place, and the ways in which sexual agency is mapped on the body and in consciousness. The cultural turn in ethnography has expanded the scope of ethnographic research methods, which now include innovative techniques that recognize and value sensuous scholarship (ethnographic works that incorporate visual, aural, and sensory texts). Hollywood has often been a focus in critical cultural theory; absent from the field is a holistic methodological perspective that collages visual image, arts-based ethnographic and autoethnographic narratives, experimental sound, poetry, and performative writing, in order to juxtapose the conflicting and complex performative nature of Hollywood, celebrity, glamour, and sexual agency.

1
Burbank⁴⁵

Image 1.1 Above Burbank

Main House.

Behind a main house on a strip of concrete
a woman laughs. The neighbor hears.

Behind a front façade
sit rows upon rows upon rows of apartment boxes.
A Perfect City.
The TV is always on.

A man coughs. The neighbor hears.
Murmurs in the main house.
She sleeps

with the TV on.

Never.

I never wanted to move to LA.

Fog.

A west coast mist covers the street this Sunday morning, the sky a cloud grey. No hint of rain, just fistfuls of fog batter in the air, in my lungs. The street at 7am is dark, blank except the yellow glow of a street lamp. I stand on a damp sidewalk waiting for something to move, someone to speak. One small black Toyota truck shifts into second gear and putters up the street.

Here.

“It’s always been my dream,” she says as we slip and snake naked legs. I move my fingers over her brown freckled shoulders.

"I know, babe. I know. And should go. I will wait for you." words move smoothly from me. I think you should go. I know you My heart stutters then sinks as my

“Would you come with me?”

“Yes,” I say dreamily. I slip into her skin, wrap my arms around her body.

Place.

I moved to Los Angeles, Burbank specifically, in 2007, while writing my dissertation to follow my girlfriend who left three months earlier than I. She wanted to make it in Hollywood. I had to finish my semester.

I see jazz hands, the kick of the dancing foot and the wicked grin. I hear in singsong, “Hollywood. De de dena na na Hollywood.”

I did not know it might destroy me, certainly destroy us, in the mean time.

A place seeps into the body—as you become a part of the landscape, through the rhythm of the surrounding cars, the jingle of keys, the stubble of grass against naked skin—the snap of a broken heart.

I am not a victim.

Phone Call.

She calls. “Hey Babe, I’m on set right now. You are never going to believe it. Yea, Kelly H. is a bitch. She is like walking around here as if she shat gold.” I listen with an aching heart to her stories about her new job on set, the scandals, the insecurities, the falsities, and the promises of success. I have a few months until I join her. I don’t know if I really want to go.

“Rolling!” She calls out and by default into my ear, then, she whispers, “I gotta go Babe. I’ll call you in the morning. I love you.”

I hang up and on this tan sofa in Florida. I look at our dogs curled at my feet. I hear the silence. I begin to cry.

From the east coast, I imagine the strange world she lives in. I can see her sleepy over the wheel, driving an hour from her Aunt and Uncle’s home in Thousand Oaks into Los Feliz to cart stars from their trailers to the set. I see her getting coffee, kombucha, and water for their parched lips.

I hear her say, “You’ll never believe who was doing blow in their trailer.”

I hear her say, “Yea, they are all unbelievably skinny.”

I hear her say, “Of course I’m attracted to her. She’s an actress.

She is supposed to be beautiful.”

I hear her say, “Craft services, yea, they get them whatever food they want. But D, she only eats salad and salmon. I don’t think L eats at all.”

I hear her say, “We’ve all been propositioned. Non-union members will do anything for a union card. Jack just got a blowjob in his car during lunch. The bastard didn’t even give her a voucher.”

I hear her say, “I love you.”

She is “making it” in the entertainment industry, working as a production assistant. She has started at the bottom rung to move on up the ladder. It’s a world I don’t quite understand. Like Dungeons and Dragons, people in the entertainment industry maneuver unions and guilds, gain entry with time spent at the bottom. Pay their dues and yet, some don’t make it quite like they thought they would. The rungs of this ladder seem oiled. At the top is a cloud that most fall thru.

Spool.

A large spool of rope just bounced off a truck and rolled past me into the oncoming traffic. I wait for the accident. Fear the swerve of the car that avoids it and jumps onto this sidewalk and smashes into my body.

Entertainment.

Much of the growth of Burbank echoes that of the entertainment industry. By 1940 Warners, Columbia Pictures and Walt Disney Studios all had locations in Burbank. In the next two decades they were joined by television’s NBC, and the phrase, ‘Beautiful Downtown Burbank’ became a familiar refrain in TV-tied American households.⁴⁶

And yet, Burbank is the hidden entertainment town in Los Angeles. At least to those on the outside, Burbank is not a recognized destination city. Tourists find the walk of fame first. They travel over the hill that separates Hollywood from the valley. And most are shocked to discover the rows upon rows of studio lots in Burbank. The clean city, the perfect city, hides behind the fantasy, glamour, and rot of Hollywood.

Airport.

The plane lands with a fickle jump.

Outside the airport, we embrace.

Kiss.

I feel overwhelmed, anxious.

I feel my fat jiggle.

I know my plastic sunglasses look quite silly.

Prada, Louis Vitton bags, teacup dogs. Fluffy boots.

Skinny jeans that fit emaciated bodies.

A wave of fear.

The browned roots show through my blonde hair.

A cacophony of insecurity.

I get in the car.

My yellowed teeth show behind this half-hearted smile.

The Frontier.

People migrated from the east, in search of gold, in search of the promise in change, to conquer the Western Frontier. In caravans, on foot, on horseback, one by one, two by two, town by town, homestead by homestead, California was a frontier of promise, or purpose and hope.

This frontier with the powerful Pacific and magnificent mountain range, green valleys, was on the surface magnificent. And yet, California, Los Angeles territory specifically was unabashedly painful, difficult to settle.

Blue Screen.

Standing on San Fernando Boulevard, the Verdugo Mountains a backdrop, like a canvas painted in perfect light, a blue screen. I wonder if at any moment, a cartoon bunny rabbit might break through the screen. Show me it is really an illusion.

Downtown Burbank.

Perpendicular to my street runs San Fernando road, which was once a trail that ran east to west. It now houses a revitalized Downtown Burbank. On the east end, the village district, red brick patches of road, break up the monotonous concrete. Quaint shops with bright signs, colorful banners, lettering, offer interesting consumer possibility —a gym, a tailor, another restaurant, a hair salon, a beauty school. Shop after shop, the one road village has a walk-able sense of community.

From the village, one block north is the civic center, an immense concrete structure, with floors of windows, a bronze statue of a Burbank police officer, a firefighter. Burbank, its own incorporated city in Los Angeles County, has its own fire station, its own city police. There are more police per capita than in other areas in Los Angeles. Some find this comforting. Others, with something to hide, notice that they are always patrolling, always watching.

Part of the revitalization boasts, on the west end, the Mall district with three different AMC movie theaters all right next to each another. Shop after shop after shop, then the mall, inside, shop after shop after shop. Then, on the north side of the mall, an IKEA, restaurants, all corporate restaurants lined next to double/triple parking. There are fourteen parking garages in a nine-block stretch of shops.

I don’t like to shop.

I rarely have time to watch movies.

I do join the gym.

(Dis)placement: In (dis)memberment.

Since I’ve moved here, I’ve felt, no, created a sense of non-belonging,

I’ve purposively forgotten. Her. Him. The rape. The loss.

(Dis)memberment is comprised of forgetting, the detachment of limbs, and the disconnection of embodied memory from experience. (Dis)memberment, with organs on a steel slab, the heart’s arrhythmia— a resentful rhythm that shapes cancerous cells as borders between her and me, borders between my past sexual trauma and who I am today. The body parts bleeding, in patches, in layers, creates a process of dehumanization, of othering someone so you can’t feel them, feel the love or hate there anymore. (Dis)memberment creates an inability to articulate experience. You break the nerves, disconnect tendons, stretch skin until it snaps, and burn exposed skin so you can’t feel. (Dis)memberment is a temporary solution, a survival tactic. (Dis)memberment is (dis)placement from our bodies, from our sense of identity, security, a sense of being somewhere safe.

Dead Flowers.

There are flowers rotting in the vase on top of my bookshelf.

On Saturdays I go to the Burbank farmers market in Downtown Burbank. There, I sniff peaches but never buy them. I don’t like the way the peach juice grabs the insides of my cheeks and pulls them in tightly. I buy one jalapeño pepper, one green, one yellow, one red pepper. One bunch of broccoli for one dollar. I move in and out of the white erected tents with a brown cloth bag. I buy one clove of garlic. One head of lettuce. A tin of tofu from Dave the Korean man with cases of ginger and pickled seaweed. I pass the bread, loaves of fresh baked bread of all grains and flavors. I never buy a loaf knowing that it would only harden on top of my dusty refrigerator.

A boy sits in a stroller, reaches out past my legs towards the pumpkins piled high. It’s almost Halloween and the air has not lost its summer tart. It’s the dry snuff of pollution that makes its way in between palm fronds and burnt hills that sticks to the skin. The air here in Burbank is nothing like the muggy sweating heat of the east coast. The air here feels vapid, vacant, vast.

The boy cries at his empty hands as the stroller passes the pumpkins waiting to be carved.

The flowers, my flowers, hang in white plastic buckets, stripped of root and earth. Ken, the flower man, who asked me out, hugs me a bit too closely each time I arrive at the tent. I buy one bunch of lavender, one bunch of stargazers, and one handful of white lilies. One. For me. For the kitchen table. For the vase in the living room. For the vase in the foot-long hallway. For me. In solitude.

I leave the flowers in these vases for two weeks. After the first week, I watch them wilt. The smell moves from sweet and tender to must and rot. I leave them there. They hang, a slow death.

Perfect Teeth.

It was shortly after the War Between the States, in 1867, that Dr. David Burbank, a dentist from New Hampshire, bought parcels of both ranches in order to pursue a new future as a sheep rancher. Nearly twenty years later Dr. Burbank began selling portions of his property in a variety of land deals—first to the Southern Pacific Railroad and later to the Providencia Land, Water, and Development Company—both of which brought people and progress to the area. The new town of Burbank had its first lots for sale in the Spring of 1887. The City of Burbank was incorporated in 1911.⁴⁷

Dr. Burbank, a dentist, helped to craft this place into a utopian community, houses, schools, fire department, and commerce, lined up like perfect teeth, straight, shiny, glowing white. He was one of the first to conquer this portion of the western frontier, to really wr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Images
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• INTRODUCTION: LOS ANGELES RIVER
• INTRODUCTION: LOS ANGELES RIVER, REVISITED
• 1 BURBANK
• 2 BURBANK, REVISITED: ARTS-BASED AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC (RE)MEMBERING
• 3 CHATSWORTH
• 4 CHATSWORTH, REVISITED: THE COMMODIFICATION AND PERFORMANCE OF HETERONORMATIVE MASCULINE DESIRE
• 5 THE HOLLYWOOD HILLS
• 6 THE HOLLYWOOD HILLS, REVISITED: THE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE PERFORMANCE OF THE PLASTIQUE
• 7 WEST HOLLYWOOD
• 8 WEST HOLLYWOOD, REVISITED: THE QUEER PERFORMANCE OF LIMITED SURVIVABILITY
• 9 TOPANGA CANYON
• 10 TOPANGA CANYON, REVISITED: A SENSUOUS CONSCIOUSNESS
• CONCLUSION: HERE
• NOTES
• WORKS CITED
• INDEX