Masks & Figures

So on the eleventh or twelfth day finally get out to the street action carrying a small burst of energy from having finished my latest cooped-up project, and drive downtown and park under General Pershing Square. I even have my nice zipping notebook case, used once before, and could run up and join the street march noted as I circled in, instead fumble and fuss with my materiel, finally emerge on Hill Street amongst a sprinkling of homeless to note directly across the street and up at the corner, camouflage soldiers each with slung rifle, narrow shiny barrel pointed down, also note the funky bum lounging a few feet away from them, inescapably note the blade-runner machines in play above, and make it over to Broadway for a gander at the b-list crowd (the a-list on H boulevard last week on TV), here looks and threads not a problem, maybe a bit more roughed up directly per the life issues in question, there’s a wild group in a painted bus with basketball hoop on front, when it stops the freaks come out and play some ball, we all turn at the Last Book Store and I duck into an alley I happen to know, fix myself a cold beer and decide to forgo what could be a lengthy trek and just head over to the city hall park to which sooner or later they’re bound to return, on the way back along Pershing pass the military presence previously noted and then I’m walking along a sad, nearly deserted late afternoon street, cross to avoid a couple arguing, start to think I might miss everything, like a good disciple of Hunter Thompson.
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In a subjective and partly true way I easily make friends with the masks in the LACMA exhibit of 2017, as I did fifty years ago with beer-buying gentlemen on the edge of Dania, Florida black ladies’ and gentlemen’s town, and in the early stoned era, with other gentlemen we worked and bantered with, passing through, and a little later in the sagely presence of jazz greats in their late days; face into mask on display in the art pavilion, these from the Congo, some multi-headed, can see in various directions, and can see and transform the invisible to the perceptible, and develop a gaze that protects; the eye is where the mask ends, lines around it radiate arcs that fortify the community. Many eyes, many visions. There is the hornbill, there is concern for the hidden side; in Yoruba the face is the mask is the seat of the eye, when cylindrical in shape, the gaze is penetrating….
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Reckoning of a certain national non-reckoning can be pleasant enough, early Saturday evening one level up from the park in front of the west steps of city hall, hard noise-level excepted, elder-privilege ass on bench of new design, I say young person hello to a pair of cops, everyone fairly social and distant in our masks, as African as some of us are likely to get; the dimensionalizing blade machines converge west and just north above the grid, the march going along Temple will be making a right, invisible in plain sight I indulge in a bit of cranky crazy oldster yelling and blathering, and head down to a spot on the sparsely occupied lawn, young people carrying signs, couple of idiots with little firecrackers to “wake up the crowd”, ineffective there in the Charles Ives heart of the matter, there’s the Times Building, one guy has two lava sticks and is playing recorded meditation tones of the all too regular adept; finally the parade enters noisily and somewhat comically from the wrong side, the main group more concentrated than directed, there is mob flirting and dancing with the cops, up on the proscenium of the iconic Coptic phallic pile of dust the cops who’d been lounging like students in an acting class are now in a tight Rockette line, the scene seems to call for something that doesn’t happen, the main sisters of color are not shy but their speaking art has not had the time to develop, there’s a fair amount of call and response, we need a protest-runner, there is some dj music, there is the sound of police machinery, as a last resort there is slow group movement along the street, I turn the other way for a nostalgia tour of the once-Occupied premises.
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Seated figure with pipe (or vape device) can see beginnings of proto humans; somehow this is not far-fetched. Out back Jayce the dishwasher said will you take a drink from the same bottle as a black man? Roy the other dishwasher was a member of an invisible but present nation and barely spoke to Jayce, much less the bus boy. A horse and rider were first out of the heavenly ark heralding a timeless (unfortunately, mostly) time of cosmological positivism, earth (shaped into figures) centric. Hermaphrodite was a recurring character part, always with the alert gaze, friend of water spirits, ie. the “dead”. Were you anywhere near the Niger Delta between 1275 and 1360? Talk to my attorney. Do you want to speak to us or do you prefer the county, and if I had your haircut, I would not want to go there. It was 1968, the charge was marijuana, on my floor there were about half a dozen persons of whiteness (mostly with necks of redness) and ten times that many descendants of Africa, many of them young guys, blitzed with sadness, on their way to the big time, and a range of older pieces of work, like the items years later displayed on Wilshire. One Sonny Liston look-a-like, boss of the particular cage, befriended me as a fellow psychedelic. One learns to develop the serene gaze upon the other-worldly and the mask of the contemplative.
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North of the big Busby Berkeley step, down towards Temple, a thin strip of grass was a small, slightly private tented district October and November 2011, where memories and inner lives begin the locale is a locus, later everything is often smaller, in urban life so many places come to be called yesterday (you should have been here), on the north side of the block tents on one side, and in the middle the first general assembly area where there were many arrangements of selves on steps or lounging in a somewhat upright position to take the pressure off the mind that is overburdened, within the required discussions of procedures the problems of predatory finance and the re-imagination of modern life somewhere on the post-enlightenment humanist scale, anticipating the current protest against brutalism practiced upon the under-class, color-coding coming back to haunt powerism, as the faces of the American black are often easier to note and look at (more signals for the eye, and places to go inward from there), your whitey is often invisible to other whitey, except when sniffing out income level, loud passing bum on the slanted sidewalk had reminded us to go fuck ourselves, his way of saying it’s all too much, to which the only ready response was start with one step, then another; from what was the main back stage area go east and turn right along the sidewalk abutting the complex, get filmed from seven angles opening and transferring suds to a consumption apparatus, on to the main south park, also somewhat reductive, that held the tents and memories and peeps of that time, including soon enough those who were, to use the words of Mingus, beneath the underdog, but within that wave of the ill and desperate, there was a speechifying world where there was always the next speech if the present one wasn’t working, on film looks like fun and it was, in a way that engendered a certain creativity, better than Burning White Man (except in the early years), or the Coachella Women’s Correctional Institute after-party; there’d been plenty of the mainly unrecognized young (more or less) urban boho element, the percentage of individuals with skin of significant hue reflected the general population, the local ladies and gentlemen of brown-ness brought some experience with un-restful civility, the direct Afros were smaller in number and not organized, and this is still somewhat true and on display in noisier 2020 over at the southwest intersection.
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For a mother and child figure from Nigeria, looking is an act of creation and a bridge from birth to death. From black country-persons I’ve had related looks, some great, some not so. Shrine Auditorium, racially hostile 1970, jazz whitey should have split at intermission after Miles and before a performance by Nina Simone that was mostly an ugly rant. The mother and child figure from Congo is more about fertility and related mid-wifery. On a staff handle, a child and mother with filed teeth and a strong sense of cultural belonging; a kneeling woman with the proud gaze of a progeny of truth and founder of language; a Mali maternity figure with child on back, pointing down, referencing past and present; from Cameroon a dance of figures concerning the ritual death of having one’s head opened; then there is the female figure of a spouse from the other world before birth.
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Down the street note a small phalanx of motorcycle units pulsating in place, up above the blade units are like a horrid movie-trailer soundtrack, the protesters are at mash point with the cops right at the corner of Police Center Plaza, a set for the academy awards with confusing angles that project and hide the size and the power, enter crossing southwest a head case on level with the metal birds, my friend the little park, LA sadness vector biting a bit hard, from proper HST distance right into the middle of the noise and light, slightly above and slightly to the left of the barricade artists of the moment, it’s always a work in progress, the energy is good, the speech-runner is mixing in whiffs, scene needs something, from out of somewhere behind my shoulder a chorus line of cops in light riot gear, pass me, hit a sharp turn, good form, young puritan faces to laugh at, greet with an ancient gaze, the assembly has been declared illegal, dispense to the north, which way I ask the cadets, who on cue turn and retrace their footwork, hit the turn, grapevine back to the bunker, the momentum of the street is back to the City Hall proscenium, I would not be opposed to defunding some of the high tech so that we might have a better conversation, my last note of the night: sandstone steps, neon under-lighted chrome railings.
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One does not necessarily apply for the job of seeing beyond, it may be thrust upon one. This the “Big One” also sees, with no eyes, it’s all been noted, there is trust and no need for distractions, proceed with possible boredom except when entering into a relationship with the beyond, about which state a decent face mask may be produced. There is a figure of man with drum; in my dancer’s tool or toy box I have drums. Thirty years passed before I could hear, transitioning between freeways, Miss Simone sing and surround The Black Freighter. All music has political value, eyes shut to hear transcendent rhythms, drum tones communicate messages to the community from the other world.