see my response in the Files section...

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Impaired Driving—Road Violence

The results of road accidents causes study and the statistical analysis mostly support the initial hypothesis: that road violence is one aspect of social violence, and that the higher the incidence of such aggression becomes, the higher will be the rates for death and injuries on the roads. I was once advised that all the vehicle drivers should be suspect as lunatics, whereas all the pedestrians were to be regarded as potential suicides. A Chinese idiom used to indicate a person with frivolous mind by saying “a man in a passion rides a mad horse”, which can be best describe today’s road rage drivers. There is no doubt about the risks run by the drivers who drives when in a high rage, thus it would be difficult to find a safe road as long as potential rage driving exists.

There appear to be two main theories about human aggressive behavior: that it is an inborn drive capable of being released by a wide variety of signals and situations; and that it is a learned pattern of behavior in response to frustration or counter-aggression.[1] First theory can be explained when a small child displays an instinctive tendency to grab and retain what he wants without having been taught of such behavior. It implies that drivers perform aggressive actions when he or she is in hurry to reach certain destinations. The second theory can be explained as criminal gang shows numerous varieties of learned behaviors patterns which essentially are mold by the social and cultural qualities of the environment. If it is applied to driving, it would be the drivers performing dangerous or aggressive behaviors when he or she feels offended. If driving aggression is an essential part of the total violence in society, then one will have to consider not only this violence but also the situations which seem most productive of displays of aggressive behavior[2]. In many cases, accidents are caused by the inappropriate dealing of situation and emotion, rather than behavior.

The strong emotional attachment of a man to his vehicle is a common phenomenon, and it is not stretching the evidence too far to suggest that many drivers look on their vehicles as pieces of real-estate, not to mention the value and meaning of we consider. While the drivers “carry” such valuable object on the road, many of the aggressive acts of drivers cannot be explained in rational term.[3] The driver’s determination to surpass other drivers, his obvious rejection of laws designed to diminish his egotism, his feeling that he was some absolute right to unrestricted progress on highway regardless of the rights and needs of others, all these attitudes and reactions become understandable if one accepts that he or she is the owner. It is said that “an Englishman’s home is his castle is an adage sanctioned by law.”[4] The design of the automobile to some extent creates the feeling that house and car are part of each other, an illusion enhanced that car is the garage (front image) of an integral part of the house. Today, some owners even decorate the interior of their vehicles with electronic device (DVD player, karaoke bar) as if to perpetuate the feeling of domestic security.

Motor manufacturers have also been quick to seize on pride of ownership as a basis for advertising and selling their merchandises, and young male drivers were the main targets of such tactics. In a publication of 1996, it supports the belief that human aggression is an inborn drive which is as essential for human survival. Psychologist Storr indicates “that when no outside stimulus for aggressive exists, men usually seek such stimuli out in much the same way.”[5] He later states that in general aggressive behavior occurs in young men are in part a manifestation of the child’s struggle to overcome his dependence upon his parents. It is a sense of ownership, which to them means power and control that gives an impression of reaching adulthood. The car is no longer a means of transport, it is rather a part of one’s territory to be defended a aggressive displays whenever its integrity is threatened or breached.[6] If drivers normally devoted to acquisition and protection of one’s property is a partial explanation to aggressive behavior on the road, we can surmise that car owners who do not won land or property would have higher accident rates.[7] Again, this account can be applied to majority of young male drivers.

Inevitably, as car ownership bas come within the reach of more and more members of the public greater numbers of young people and emotionally disturbed people—including heavy alcohol consumer, and aggressive psychopaths—have obtained possessions of implement suited for their expression of inner violent feelings. As our society becomes more violent and shows this violence in a number of ways, perhaps we can expect that the society would become more violent as car ownership has increased.

In our culture, we treat our visitors with courtesy and warm reception, and vice versa. However, on the road, we act very differently, looking on the majority of road users treat others as rivals or impeders of our “rightful” progress. We also resent the rules that restrain what we feel to be our natural right of place and ownership. Nevertheless, it is important to take note of possible causes of road accidents, so that we may decide what should be done to minimize the occurrence.

                                                                                                                     Karen Chen

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Drive-in Driven Out In Ian Fowles’s paper, “It’s the End of the World as We Know it: A Lament on the Death of the Record Store in Los Angeles,” he describes the erosion of community space as the independent and smaller record stores are driven out of business by an unhappy coalition of burgeoning new technology and the buying power of the monster chain stores.  Fowles quotes from a blogger’s fond memories of one of Los Angeles’ iconic music stores:  “I cannot count the times I went into Tower on Sunset to kill time before a show, or hang out with some girl I was dating, or find some impossible import disc I couldn't find anyplace else. I saw Frampton come alive there, I saw Col. Parker rock there…[downloading] just doesn't have the same feeling as going into a store and buying something real that you can connect to the music with. It's not disposable like an MP3 is.” ^[1]            Fowles connects the blogger’s lament to feelings about another lost southern Californian icon, the drive-in, as he quotes from a newspaper article in which a parent says that one day, her kids will feel the same nostalgia for independent record stores as she feels for the lost experience of watching a movie from her car.           

     Beyond their shared status in our cultural consciousness, Fowles’s paper pointed towards another common characteristic of both spaces; for little or no cost, anyone could enter and claim membership in the community that formed within those sites, every day or evening.  In record stores, audiences came together to venerate music and the cultural attributes that it spawned, while rituals of dating and family played out amongst the sea of automobiles that faced towards the altar of the drive-in screen.             

          If youth flocked to record stores to learn about the music, fashion, slang, and attitudes of their culture, they moved on to drive-ins to practice and perfect their lessons with friends and dates.  All ages played out family relationships in the individual cars that made up the greater community of the drive-in audience.  To learn more about that community, I asked Carrie Williams, a Los Angeles native, about her experiences of the drive-in, from her earliest memories at five through her twenties.  “I remember lots of little kids in pajamas, so when you got home you could just go straight to bed.  Families saw all kinds of films together, before that was divided up between kids’ films and adults’ films.  I remember my Dad taking us to Bonnie and Clyde when I was about eight or nine – probably not the kind of film you’d take kids to now, but in the car, you could talk about it—and you could bury your face in your Dad’s arm if it got scary.  There were swing sets down by the screen; if you got bored you could go and play there or, before the show, when the cartoons came on, Chilly Willy and Woody Woodpecker, you knew the main films were about to start and you ran back to your car.  Sometimes kids got lost, and then there was a voice over the loudspeaker system, calling for parents to go and rescue their kid from the refreshment stand.  If you drove off too quickly, you pulled the wires out of the speaker box that hung on the car window.  And then there was the whole thing about date night—fogged up car windows.  Waiting in line and racing in for the good spots—not too near everyone else if you were on a date.  It was the Rodium in Gardena, and when I had my El Camino truck with a mattress on the truck bed, we used to back into the space and open up the back of the truck so we could watch the film lying down.  It was so much fun.”

Although its balmy climate would suggest California as a likely starting place for the “ozoners,” as they came to be known, the phenomenon began on the East Coast.  In 1933, the first outdoor movie house was patented and opened by Richard Hollingshead in New Jersey.  Despite his success in resolving technical challenges and lining up venture capital, the “World’s First Drive-in Theatre” could not sustain enough interest beyond its novelty appeal and the inventor sold the business in either 1935 or ‘36.^[2]  The build up and subsequent erosion of the drive-in culture didn’t happen overnight, and cannot be attributed to any single cause.  In his history of the drive-in, Kerry Segrave identifies the key ingredients for the success of the outdoor theatre, “…a country had to be wealthy: it had to have a good deal of vacant, accessible, relatively cheap land; and the country’s inhabitants had to be financially well placed, have automobiles, and enjoy an emotional relationship with their cars.”^[3]  After the stagnation of the fledgling industry due to wartime shortages, post-war America fit those criteria and a phenomenon was born. It grew because it was a perfect fit with the greater culture of the United States during the nineteen forties and fifties; it was in sync with the composition of the age.

During this period, social mores dictated formal attire in every day situations: being able to wear casual, comfortable clothes in the privacy of the family car became a major attraction for men tired of their business suits, and women who had to wrestle themselves into stockings and aggressive under-things on a daily basis.  You could also smoke, eat and drink, and chatter about the film without disturbing other patrons, allowing the whole family to enjoy the evening out.

Drive-in owners were quick to take advantage of the comparatively low overhead construction costs of a drive-in versus an indoor theatre, as well as capitalize on the audiences’ willingness to settle for much older films that would not have drawn a regular movie-going crowd.  While the tickets kept selling, the owners saw no reason to pressure the distributors into changing their contracts and allowing them to show the first-run films that were the staples of the indoor movie houses.

In the entrepreneurial spirit of the times, drive-ins vied with each other to offer novel conveniences for patrons, such as the “Rain-A-Way” visor, which “could be fastened to the car ‘in a matter of seconds’…and had a gutter along the side that carried the rain away while preventing it from running down the windshield,” or bottle-warming facilities, where “the mother just reaches out of her motor car, presses a button and an attendant brings her the bottle warmer.”^[4]  Such features seemed unnecessary with the sky-rocketing growth between 1942, when 27 states were home to 95 ozoners, compared to more than 3,700 active outdoor theatres in 1955.^[5]

          By 1958, the numbers showed that behemoth drive-ins, some able to accommodate 2,500 cars, had out-built their audience, and the golden years were coming to a close; in 1954 the average ozoner drew 93,100 admissions, while four years later, the draw was 82,900.[6]  By this time, the institution was reproducing itself; it had become a staple shooting set for movies that wanted to establish a visceral feeling of time and place for the American experience.  Consider the contributions that settings made to the following films, a small selection of the list in which drive-ins play their part as a prominent set: Back to the Future Part III, partly filmed at the Pohatchee Drive-In,  fictitious, propped for the film in Monument Valley, California;  Grease, partly filmed at the Pickwick Drive-In in Burbank, California, now gone; The Lords of Flatbush; The Lost Boys, partly filmed at the Skyview Drive In Theater, Santa Cruz, California, and  The Outsiders, partly filmed at the Admiral Twin Drive-In in Tulsa, Oklahoma, still in operation.^[7]

Often the drive-in would be used in the movie as the site of teenage sex, and perhaps the nickname, “passion pit” accurately described the drive-in’s key attraction for many audience members.  Families traditionally parked in the front, dating teens in the center, and “those with serious sex on their minds took up the back rows.”^[8]  With limited other options for a private make-out space, societal restrictions on single sex helped build the box office receipts during the forties and fifties, but on-screen sex was more problematic for owners.  Community and family values were tested with increasingly graphic content in sixties’ films until in 1968, audiences were separated into age cohorts, governed by the Motion Pictures Association of America rating system, and the public space of the movie experience was narrowed to fit within a more intimate and administered site. 

Audiences were further eroded when malls sprang up near newly built suburban tracts, and families were no longer so dependent on cars to carry them to their entertainment.  Suddenly there were multiplexes available without having to leave the neighborhood shopping environment, and drive-ins lost ground to the all-in-one convenience of the mall, as ozoners were not able to match either the variety or the quality of the indoor movie-going experience.  By 1987, the total number of drive-ins was down to 914.^[9]

As California property values soared, land cost became a significant factor in the reduction of the numbers of drive-ins.  In 1968, the median price of a home in California was $23,210, rising to $450,990 in 2004.^[10]  Currently, the average cost of a California home on the market is $733,000.^[11]  With their large footprints and limited financial return, drive-ins cannot compete with other land-use when costs are that high.

The history of drive-ins has a certain inevitability as human need for idiosyncratic community spaces in the public sphere succumbs to economic and cultural pressure.  As with so many other losses sustained in the progressive march forward, it is really only in hindsight that we can weigh up the costs of what has gone.  When drive-ins, music stores, small jazz clubs, and independent book stores bite the dust, other public space is created, but it is different; the public space of a mall, or a theme park, or an indoor movie theatre, is a site of commerce in a way that overwhelms any other function.  Drive-ins and independent music and book stores were trying to be commercial, but there was scope in their make-up for something beyond the bottom line.  They were generous entities with enough room to spare for passion of purpose as well as the entrepreneurial excitement of making money.  Communities could, and did, flow in and out of those spaces, remaking themselves in light of what they found there.

Psychologically, we are diminished by the reduction of sites of community where we could come into regular informal contact with heterogeneous groups, in relaxed and relaxing circumstances.  Loss of social trust can be traced to this, among other, factors as studies have shown that 18 – 25 year olds demonstrated a sharp decline in their belief that “most people are trustworthy, fair, and helpful” between 1875 and 1997.  Although the reasons for this have not been pinpointed, trends towards increasing materialism and self-interest are implicated.  The context of competition for limited resources may provide a reason that we are less likely to trust “others” who, like ourselves, are more likely to want to accumulate more for themselves.  The opportunity to meet people outside of your own family, school and neighborhood, creates ways for people to lessen the stereotyping that leads to “othering,” as they learn to interact within informal communities.^[12]

These findings, although not conclusive, are extremely worrying in light of increased “othering” of persons who are different from us in the fragile global political situation.  To put it simply, there has been a loss of public spaces where informal communities can meet, form, and learn from each other.  We live in a climate where suspicion of people different from us is institutionally instilled through the media apparatus, and lack of frequent informal interactions with diverse individuals and groups may lower trust of “others.”  This is not a recipe for improved relationships between groups distinguished by their differences, at a time when we need all the bridges we can build.

Bring back the drive-ins!

Sources Consulted:

 Fowles, Ian.  “It’s the End of the World as We Know it: A Lament on the Death of the Record Store in Los Angeles,” quotes on-line weblog found at <http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=15368910&blogID=180174426&MyToken=8ce0969c-82e6-40a6-84ea-246474230bad> accessed 19 October 2006.

Omoto, Allen M., ed.  Processes of Community Change and Social Action.  London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2005.

Rappaport, Julian.  Community Psychology.  New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977.

RealEstateabc.com. Website available at: http://www.realestateabc.com/graphs/calmedian.htm; accessed April 18, 2007.Trulia.com. Website available at: www.trulia.com/home-prices/ , accessed April 18, 2007.Segrave, Kerry.  Drive-in Theatres: A History from their Inception in 1933.  Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 1992.Wikipedia. On-line encyclopedia article about Drive-in Movie Houses; available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive-in_theater#Movies_that_feature_ scenes_at_drive-in_theaters; accessed on April 19, 2007.

---

^[1] On-line weblog found at <http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=15368910&blogID=180174426&MyToken=8ce0969c-82e6-40a6-84ea-246474230bad> accessed 19 October 2006, quoted in Ian Fowles, “It’s the End of the World as We Know it”: A Lament on the Death of the Record Store in Los Angeles,” http://claremontconversation.org/tcourse/losangeles/page/mid+term+paper+Ian+Fowles+-+Death+of+the+Record+Store+in+LA , accessed on April 1, 2007. 

^[2] Kerry Segrave, Drive-in Theatres: A History from their Inception in 1933 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 1992),  9.

^[3] Ibid. vii.

^[4] Ibid., 40.

^[5] Ibid., 33.

^[6] Ibid., 77.

^[7] Information about films that feature scenes shot at drive-ins can be found on Wikipedia, accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive-in_theater#Movies_that_feature_scenes_at_drive-in_theaters, on April 19, 2007.

^[8] Segrave, Drive-in Theatres, 152.

^[9] Ibid. Appendix C.

^[10] Median home prices for California listed at RealEstateabc.com, available at: http://www.realestateabc.com/graphs/calmedian.htm, accessed April 18, 2007.

^[11] Current real estate price information listed on the Trulia.com website, available at: www.trulia.com/home-prices/ , accessed April 18, 2007.

^[12] This paragraph is based on findings from studies cited in Processes of Community Change and Social Action, ed. Allen M. Omoto (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2005). Chapter 8: “Social Participation and Social Trust in Adolescence: The Importance of Heterogeneous Encounters,” gives detailed information about the studies, but due to space limitations in this project, I have abstracted the findings in order to briefly reference them in this paper.

[More]

Drive-in Driven Out In Ian Fowles’s paper, “It’s the End of the World as We Know it: A Lament on the Death of the Record Store in Los Angeles,” he describes the erosion of community space as the independent and smaller record stores are driven out of business by an unhappy coalition of burgeoning new technology and the buying power of the monster chain stores.  Fowles quotes from a blogger’s fond memories of one of Los Angeles’ iconic music stores:  “I cannot count the times I went into Tower on Sunset to kill time before a show, or hang out with some girl I was dating, or find some impossible import disc I couldn't find anyplace else. I saw Frampton come alive there, I saw Col. Parker rock there…[downloading] just doesn't have the same feeling as going into a store and buying something real that you can connect to the music with. It's not disposable like an MP3 is.” ^[1]            Fowles connects the blogger’s lament to feelings about another lost southern Californian icon, the drive-in, as he quotes from a newspaper article in which a parent says that one day, her kids will feel the same nostalgia for independent record stores as she feels for the lost experience of watching a movie from her car.           

     Beyond their shared status in our cultural consciousness, Fowles’s paper pointed towards another common characteristic of both spaces; for little or no cost, anyone could enter and claim membership in the community that formed within those sites, every day or evening.  In record stores, audiences came together to venerate music and the cultural attributes that it spawned, while rituals of dating and family played out amongst the sea of automobiles that faced towards the altar of the drive-in screen.             

          If youth flocked to record stores to learn about the music, fashion, slang, and attitudes of their culture, they moved on to drive-ins to practice and perfect their lessons with friends and dates.  All ages played out family relationships in the individual cars that made up the greater community of the drive-in audience.  To learn more about that community, I asked Carrie Williams, a Los Angeles native, about her experiences of the drive-in, from her earliest memories at five through her twenties.  “I remember lots of little kids in pajamas, so when you got home you could just go straight to bed.  Families saw all kinds of films together, before that was divided up between kids’ films and adults’ films.  I remember my Dad taking us to Bonnie and Clyde when I was about eight or nine – probably not the kind of film you’d take kids to now, but in the car, you could talk about it—and you could bury your face in your Dad’s arm if it got scary.  There were swing sets down by the screen; if you got bored you could go and play there or, before the show, when the cartoons came on, Chilly Willy and Woody Woodpecker, you knew the main films were about to start and you ran back to your car.  Sometimes kids got lost, and then there was a voice over the loudspeaker system, calling for parents to go and rescue their kid from the refreshment stand.  If you drove off too quickly, you pulled the wires out of the speaker box that hung on the car window.  And then there was the whole thing about date night—fogged up car windows.  Waiting in line and racing in for the good spots—not too near everyone else if you were on a date.  It was the Rodium in Gardena, and when I had my El Camino truck with a mattress on the truck bed, we used to back into the space and open up the back of the truck so we could watch the film lying down.  It was so much fun.”

Although its balmy climate would suggest California as a likely starting place for the “ozoners,” as they came to be known, the phenomenon began on the East Coast.  In 1933, the first outdoor movie house was patented and opened by Richard Hollingshead in New Jersey.  Despite his success in resolving technical challenges and lining up venture capital, the “World’s First Drive-in Theatre” could not sustain enough interest beyond its novelty appeal and the inventor sold the business in either 1935 or ‘36.^[2]  The build up and subsequent erosion of the drive-in culture didn’t happen overnight, and cannot be attributed to any single cause.  In his history of the drive-in, Kerry Segrave identifies the key ingredients for the success of the outdoor theatre, “…a country had to be wealthy: it had to have a good deal of vacant, accessible, relatively cheap land; and the country’s inhabitants had to be financially well placed, have automobiles, and enjoy an emotional relationship with their cars.”^[3]  After the stagnation of the fledgling industry due to wartime shortages, post-war America fit those criteria and a phenomenon was born. It grew because it was a perfect fit with the greater culture of the United States during the nineteen forties and fifties; it was in sync with the composition of the age.

During this period, social mores dictated formal attire in every day situations: being able to wear casual, comfortable clothes in the privacy of the family car became a major attraction for men tired of their business suits, and women who had to wrestle themselves into stockings and aggressive under-things on a daily basis.  You could also smoke, eat and drink, and chatter about the film without disturbing other patrons, allowing the whole family to enjoy the evening out.

Drive-in owners were quick to take advantage of the comparatively low overhead construction costs of a drive-in versus an indoor theatre, as well as capitalize on the audiences’ willingness to settle for much older films that would not have drawn a regular movie-going crowd.  While the tickets kept selling, the owners saw no reason to pressure the distributors into changing their contracts and allowing them to show the first-run films that were the staples of the indoor movie houses.

In the entrepreneurial spirit of the times, drive-ins vied with each other to offer novel conveniences for patrons, such as the “Rain-A-Way” visor, which “could be fastened to the car ‘in a matter of seconds’…and had a gutter along the side that carried the rain away while preventing it from running down the windshield,” or bottle-warming facilities, where “the mother just reaches out of her motor car, presses a button and an attendant brings her the bottle warmer.”^[4]  Such features seemed unnecessary with the sky-rocketing growth between 1942, when 27 states were home to 95 ozoners, compared to more than 3,700 active outdoor theatres in 1955.^[5]

          By 1958, the numbers showed that behemoth drive-ins, some able to accommodate 2,500 cars, had out-built their audience, and the golden years were coming to a close; in 1954 the average ozoner drew 93,100 admissions, while four years later, the draw was 82,900.[6]  By this time, the institution was reproducing itself; it had become a staple shooting set for movies that wanted to establish a visceral feeling of time and place for the American experience.  Consider the contributions that settings made to the following films, a small selection of the list in which drive-ins play their part as a prominent set: Back to the Future Part III, partly filmed at the Pohatchee Drive-In,  fictitious, propped for the film in Monument Valley, California;  Grease, partly filmed at the Pickwick Drive-In in Burbank, California, now gone; The Lords of Flatbush; The Lost Boys, partly filmed at the Skyview Drive In Theater, Santa Cruz, California, and  The Outsiders, partly filmed at the Admiral Twin Drive-In in Tulsa, Oklahoma, still in operation.^[7]

Often the drive-in would be used in the movie as the site of teenage sex, and perhaps the nickname, “passion pit” accurately described the drive-in’s key attraction for many audience members.  Families traditionally parked in the front, dating teens in the center, and “those with serious sex on their minds took up the back rows.”^[8]  With limited other options for a private make-out space, societal restrictions on single sex helped build the box office receipts during the forties and fifties, but on-screen sex was more problematic for owners.  Community and family values were tested with increasingly graphic content in sixties’ films until in 1968, audiences were separated into age cohorts, governed by the Motion Pictures Association of America rating system, and the public space of the movie experience was narrowed to fit within a more intimate and administered site. 

Audiences were further eroded when malls sprang up near newly built suburban tracts, and families were no longer so dependent on cars to carry them to their entertainment.  Suddenly there were multiplexes available without having to leave the neighborhood shopping environment, and drive-ins lost ground to the all-in-one convenience of the mall, as ozoners were not able to match either the variety or the quality of the indoor movie-going experience.  By 1987, the total number of drive-ins was down to 914.^[9]

As California property values soared, land cost became a significant factor in the reduction of the numbers of drive-ins.  In 1968, the median price of a home in California was $23,210, rising to $450,990 in 2004.^[10]  Currently, the average cost of a California home on the market is $733,000.^[11]  With their large footprints and limited financial return, drive-ins cannot compete with other land-use when costs are that high.

The history of drive-ins has a certain inevitability as human need for idiosyncratic community spaces in the public sphere succumbs to economic and cultural pressure.  As with so many other losses sustained in the progressive march forward, it is really only in hindsight that we can weigh up the costs of what has gone.  When drive-ins, music stores, small jazz clubs, and independent book stores bite the dust, other public space is created, but it is different; the public space of a mall, or a theme park, or an indoor movie theatre, is a site of commerce in a way that overwhelms any other function.  Drive-ins and independent music and book stores were trying to be commercial, but there was scope in their make-up for something beyond the bottom line.  They were generous entities with enough room to spare for passion of purpose as well as the entrepreneurial excitement of making money.  Communities could, and did, flow in and out of those spaces, remaking themselves in light of what they found there.

Psychologically, we are diminished by the reduction of sites of community where we could come into regular informal contact with heterogeneous groups, in relaxed and relaxing circumstances.  Loss of social trust can be traced to this, among other, factors as studies have shown that 18 – 25 year olds demonstrated a sharp decline in their belief that “most people are trustworthy, fair, and helpful” between 1875 and 1997.  Although the reasons for this have not been pinpointed, trends towards increasing materialism and self-interest are implicated.  The context of competition for limited resources may provide a reason that we are less likely to trust “others” who, like ourselves, are more likely to want to accumulate more for themselves.  The opportunity to meet people outside of your own family, school and neighborhood, creates ways for people to lessen the stereotyping that leads to “othering,” as they learn to interact within informal communities.^[12]

These findings, although not conclusive, are extremely worrying in light of increased “othering” of persons who are different from us in the fragile global political situation.  To put it simply, there has been a loss of public spaces where informal communities can meet, form, and learn from each other.  We live in a climate where suspicion of people different from us is institutionally instilled through the media apparatus, and lack of frequent informal interactions with diverse individuals and groups may lower trust of “others.”  This is not a recipe for improved relationships between groups distinguished by their differences, at a time when we need all the bridges we can build.

Bring back the drive-ins!

Sources Consulted:

 Fowles, Ian.  “It’s the End of the World as We Know it: A Lament on the Death of the Record Store in Los Angeles,” quotes on-line weblog found at <http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=15368910&blogID=180174426&MyToken=8ce0969c-82e6-40a6-84ea-246474230bad> accessed 19 October 2006.

Omoto, Allen M., ed.  Processes of Community Change and Social Action.  London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2005.

Rappaport, Julian.  Community Psychology.  New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977.

RealEstateabc.com. Website available at: http://www.realestateabc.com/graphs/calmedian.htm; accessed April 18, 2007.Trulia.com. Website available at: www.trulia.com/home-prices/ , accessed April 18, 2007.Segrave, Kerry.  Drive-in Theatres: A History from their Inception in 1933.  Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 1992.Wikipedia. On-line encyclopedia article about Drive-in Movie Houses; available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive-in_theater#Movies_that_feature_ scenes_at_drive-in_theaters; accessed on April 19, 2007.

---

^[1] On-line weblog found at <http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=15368910&blogID=180174426&MyToken=8ce0969c-82e6-40a6-84ea-246474230bad> accessed 19 October 2006, quoted in Ian Fowles, “It’s the End of the World as We Know it”: A Lament on the Death of the Record Store in Los Angeles,” http://claremontconversation.org/tcourse/losangeles/page/mid+term+paper+Ian+Fowles, accessed on April 1, 2007. 

^[2] Kerry Segrave, Drive-in Theatres: A History from their Inception in 1933 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 1992),  9.

^[3] Ibid. vii.

^[4] Ibid., 40.

^[5] Ibid., 33.

^[6] Ibid., 77.

^[7] Information about films that feature scenes shot at drive-ins can be found on Wikipedia, accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive-in_theater#Movies_that_feature_scenes_at_drive-in_theaters, on April 19, 2007.

^[8] Segrave, Drive-in Theatres, 152.

^[9] Ibid. Appendix C.

^[10] Median home prices for California listed at RealEstateabc.com, available at: http://www.realestateabc.com/graphs/calmedian.htm, accessed April 18, 2007.

^[11] Current real estate price information listed on the Trulia.com website, available at: www.trulia.com/home-prices/ , accessed April 18, 2007.

^[12] This paragraph is based on findings from studies cited in Processes of Community Change and Social Action, ed. Allen M. Omoto (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2005). Chapter 8: “Social Participation and Social Trust in Adolescence: The Importance of Heterogeneous Encounters,” gives detailed information about the studies, but due to space limitations in this project, I have abstracted the findings in order to briefly reference them in this paper.

[More]

Ian Fowles

5-1-07

TDNY 401

Los Angeles

  Black Flag: Damaging the Southern California Image  

Intro

While reading and reflecting on Taylor Smith’s essay and presentation on The Beach Boys, I began thinking about how certain bands become representatives for their hometown. Bruce Springsteen was the poster boy of Asbury Park, New Jersey. Black Sabbath embodied working class Birmingham, England. When I thought about bands that have come from the Los Angeles area since The Beach Boys, it became clear that there was one band that stood out as not only the complete polar opposite of them in almost every way, but also portrayed L.A. and the southern California experience completely different. That band was Black Flag.

Background

Black Flag was formed by guitarist Greg Ginn in 1976 in the same South Bay area of Los Angeles County that The Beach Boys hailed from. The band originally called themselves ‘Panic’ after the style of their songs which had very fast tempos and very short durations. Soon, however they found another band had already taken the name. At the suggestion of Ginn’s younger brother and band artist who went by ‘Raymond Pettibon’, they then donned the moniker Black Flag. Pettibon had designed a logo for them consisting of four vertical bars that looked like a rippling flag in the wind. Michael Azerrad notes the significance of the band’s new name,

“If a white flag means surrender, it was plain what a black flag meant; a black flag is also a recognized symbol of anarchy, not to mention the traditional emblem of pirates; it sounded a bit like their heroes Black Sabbath as well. Of course, the fact that Black Flag was also a popular insecticide didn’t hurt either. ‘We were comfortable with all the implications of the name,’ says Ginn, ‘as well as it just sounded, you know, heavy.’”[1]

 

This ‘heaviness’ was an essential part of both the Black Flag sound and image. Being influenced by bands like the Ramones, MC5, and Iggy Pop, Black Flag took punk rock to a new level and pioneered a sound that came to be called ‘hardcore’. Their music was an outlet to work out the tensions and issues that they encountered in their bland L.A. suburban existence. They did not identify with the surf culture championed by The Beach Boys. “Ginn disdained the conformity and materialism of surfing…he preferred to write poetry and do ham radio.”[2] In fact Black Flag’s music

“was a harsh wake-up call for the California dream: for all the perfect weather and affluent lifestyles, there was something gnawing at its youth. Los Angeles wasn’t a sun-splashed utopia anymore – it was an alienated, smog-choked sprawl rife with racial and class tensions, recession, and stifling boredom.”[3]

 

It wasn’t long until this sentiment was being voiced by other adolescents across the country. In 1979 Black Flag released their first EP called Nervous Breakdown which became the template for the national hardcore punk scene to follow. In January 1982 the band released Damaged their first full length LP with Greg Ginn and vocalist Henry Rollins becoming the most permanent members of the group.

“Damaged made a fairly big impact in Europe and England…who were fascinated by the revelation that there was a really radical punk rock scene developing in the beach communities of Southern California, which they previously looked on as an idyllic promised land, seemingly the last place where kids would flip a musical middle finger at society. ‘And it caused certain people to think, ‘Well, is this legitimate?’’ says Ginn. ‘There’s that element of ‘This is wrong, coming from this place. People like that should be coming from Birmingham, England. You guys have it good.’ But when you’re surrounded by Genesis fans, I don’t know how idyllic that is. When you’re surrounded by that materialistic kind of a thing and you’re looking for something deeper than that, then that’s not an ideal environment.”[4]

 

Not only was Black Flag’s music a stylistic middle finger to modern mainstream rock bands like Journey, Foghat, and Peter Frampton, but also a cultural one as well. In a way Black Flag had a mission to undo the work The Beach Boys had done in idealizing Southern California to the world. They had to let people know the new reality of living in LA in the 1980’s under Reaganomics.

Equality

The band was plagued with numerous lineup changes throughout their career, which also became a trend in hardcore bands to follow. It is interesting to notice that Black Flag reflected the racial diversity and open-mindedness of Los Angeles in their personnel changes. One could even call Black Flag an equal opportunity band. Singer Chavo Pederast (born Ron Reyes) was Puerto Rican, drummer ROBO (born Roberto Valverde) was Columbian, and producer Spot (born Glenn Lockett) was African American. Additionally, in their most prolific recording and touring years (1983-1985), female bassist Kira Roessler (who often played in a dress) held down the bottom end of the rhythm section.

Musical Style

Compared to The Beach Boys, Black Flag was an aural assault on the ears. There are no angelic choruses and high harmonized vocal melodies. There are no nice sounding guitars and keyboards. The Black Flag sound was characterized by loud, highly distorted guitars, vocals that were more screaming than singing, pounding bass and frenetic drumming. It was powerful and abrasive music, perhaps the foremost of its time. Chris Doherty, singer of Boston based hardcore band Gang Green recalls the hardcore style that Black Flag forged. He said “we weren’t singing, we were just screaming against authority and our parents and everything that was pissing us off in our lives.”[5] Just as The Beach Boys used their everyday activities as inspiration for songs, so did Black Flag; only times had changed in America.

Lyrical Content

            While in 1966 The Beach boys sang “God only knows what I’d be without you”[6], in 1980 Black Flag sang “I’ve got no values, might as well blow you away.”[7] Keith Morris, Black Flag’s first vocalist recalls how “the music we were performing, the lyrics that we were writing, had nothing to do with holding hands and smiling and skipping off into the sunset.”[8] They sang about their experience of boredom, depression, and alienation in L.A.’s suburban wasteland. With song titles such as ‘Depression’, ‘Nervous Breakdown’, ‘American Waste’, ‘You Bet We’ve Got Something Personal Against You!’, ‘Life of Pain’, ‘Thirsty and Miserable’ Black Flag shoved their discontent in the public’s face. Their songs were adolescent (and post-adolescent) angst and turmoil in musical form. Black Flag would often play with bands like Fear and X who had a similar loathing for the big city of L.A. The lyrics for X’s song “Los Angeles” describe either an immigrant or tourist who had to get out of L.A. because she couldn’t stand the racial, sexual, and class diversity of the place. Fear’s anti-L.A. “I Love Livin’ in the City” is a sarcastic rant about the dark and dirty side of the city, including lists of disgusting sights and smells one can encounter in the slums. However, they boys in Fear would much rather live in L.A. than New York City. In their song “New York’s Alright if You Like Saxophones”, vocalist Lee Ving (born Lee James Capalero) lists the things that he finds repulsive about New York, such as freezing to death or being pushed in front of the subway.

The roughness of the streets of Los Angeles would be a theme that would reappear in the L.A. glam metal scene in the mid to late 1980’s. It was a scene that was directly influenced by Black Flag and their contemporaries[9]. Bands like Guns N’ Roses, Poison, and Mötley Crüe often produced songs that spoke of the evils of life on the streets of Hollywood/L.A. The main themes dealt with corruption, violence, and filth of L.A. and the fate of those naive souls who were transformed through moving here. Unlike most L.A. punk and hardcore acts, the members of most metal bands were transplants to Southern California. For example, no member of the original lineup of Guns N’ Roses was born or raised in L.A. These songs were their own lived experiences as well as that of friends and bandmates who had migrated to Los Angeles from other parts of the country and had their eyes opened to the true grit of the big city. Poison’s tune “Fallen Angel” is about a disillusioned small town girl becoming a whore after arriving in the big city. Mötley Crüe’s track “Dr. Feelgood” is about a drug lord who is the one really running the city streets. Guns N’ Roses had songs like “Welcome to the Jungle”, “Paradise City”, and “Move to the City”. A close inspection of the lyrics to these particular songs is telling, especially given the fact vocalist/lyricist W. Axl Rose was born and raised in rural Lafayette, Indiana and moved to L.A. at 20 years old. Rock critic/journalist Chuck Klosterman believes however, that “Axl clearly loved the concept of Los Angeles, even if he constantly sang about how disgusting it was.”[10] Again, this is the love/hate relationship that the 70’s punks had with the place, and most likely reflects the views of many other citizens of the L.A. region.

Live Performance

The live performance for Black Flag was meant as a site of a cathartic release, but after a while touring became exhausting to both band members and audience. On a tour in 1984 they coined the term for their theory of live performance as ‘the blasting concept’ which was an all out “sonic assault on the audience.”[11] A live concert could literally be punishing for attendees not only because of volume and duration of the performance, but also dealing with youths ‘slam dancing’ – a new and aggressive form of dancing forged in the clubs of Los Angeles that caused participants to collide in circular motions on the floor, often sustaining injuries.

There were many times in Los Angeles where hardcore punk shows would end with the police breaking up the event, and occasionally in a riot of violence or police brutality. Even just living in LA as a young ‘punk rocker’ in that time could be scary. In singer Henry Rollins’ journal from his years in Black Flag he writes

“I’m scared to walk around my neighborhood in L.A. I’m afraid of getting picked up by the pigs. I’ve had enough fucked up experiences at night with them. I’m afraid of getting picked up and getting the shit beaten out of me by the swine.”[12]

 

Black Flag was not the first band to draw Johnny Law’s attention in Los Angeles. Bands like Fear, The Circle Jerks, The Germs, and X had already been dealing with their abusive authority for a few years. Ginn even claimed that phones had been tapped and plainclothes officers had been following band members on occasion.

Recording

            Taylor spoke of the recording techniques that The Beach Boys used which made their music ‘sparkle’ like aural sunshine. Their songs were recorded and mixed in such a fashion that the final product lacked bass and low frequencies. For Black Flag however, the opposite effect was sought after and achieved. If The Beach Boys music sounded like sunshine, then the music of Black Flag is the sound of darkness. There was even darkness inherent in their chosen band name. They wanted a sound that was low, ‘heavy’, and ‘metallic’. This soundscape more accurately reflected their experience of living in the city of angels. Azerrad notes that as time went on, “[t]he sound got much more metallic and sludgy, with Ginn anchoring the music with bottom-heavy bass-and-guitar formations.”[13] Things were heavy as opposed to light; the members of Black Flag felt like they were being crushed by the weight of the city and its institutions and devices. The ‘metallic’ sound reflected the built environment of freeways and buildings, not the natural panorama of the beach and the ocean endorsed so highly by South Bay alumni The Beach Boys. Through this new sound, Black Flag were creating a voice for their own and subsequent generations.

Black Flag’s records were of a consistent low fidelity quality due mainly to their lack of a descent budget to record on the best and latest equipment. However, this rawness adds a heavy characteristic to their sound that might have been missing had they been able to record in a major studio with a big-name producer who would most likely have tried to sterilize their sound. Black Flag didn’t wait around for a major label to offer them a contract either. They knew if they wanted a record pressed they would have to do it themselves. Thus SST Records was born. SST stood for Solid State Transmitters because Ginn was an amateur at ham radio. SST became the model for underground labels across the country to emulate, such as Dischord, Frontier, Posh Boy, and New Alliance. SST released records by such influential bands as The Minutemen, the Descendents[14], Bad Brains, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr., among others.

Image

Black Flag portrayed a very somber image. The artwork on their flyers and record covers spoke to their suburban teenage angst and dissatisfaction. Guitarists Greg Ginn’s brother, under the pseudonym Raymond Pettibon, was the bands primary graphic artist. “Pettibon’s pen-and-ink artwork was a perfect visual analogue to the music it promoted – gritty, stark, violent, smart, provocative, and utterly American.”[15] Singer Henry Rollins reflected on the artistic image of Black Flag in a recent documentary called American Hardcore, where he said

“Black Flag had this austere, kind of, very earnest/serious thing about them that made you kind of respect it—be in awe of it. The band had a logo. The band had a look. The four bars. It was really all very overwhelming. And just had this intense take on things. They had a political agenda.”[16]

 

Flyers often included blatantly offensive material containing controversial images of public figures and taboo subjects that pushed the limits of convention and decency, which is part of what the hardcore subculture was about. The visual art of L.A. hardcore and punk flyers were

“all the craft of a hastily scribbled note left on the kitchen table by someone running out on an errand…Punk graphics…were hit-and-run because things were moving fast then and it was all about getting information across. Shows were organized, promoted, and presented in a matter of days…all were conceived and brought to fruition quickly and on minimal funds…In classic dada tradition, punks rejected the Academy and drew instead from ‘low’ sources: graffiti, underground comics, advertising, car culture, the tarot, blaxploitation, bondage and pornography, surf culture, fifties industrial films, Mad magazine, and the universe of American detritus that winds up in thrift stores. It all got tossed in the blender, and though the results were often visually crude, they were invariably witty.”[17]

 

On stage, the attire of Black Flag couldn’t be farther from the Pendletons

(and later, the Hawaiian print shirts) of The Beach Boys. Black Flag were so poor that they would receive bags of second hand clothes from Goodwill and Salvation Army type stores that guitarist Ginn’s father would buy for them by the pound for pennies. Hardcore ‘fashion’ “was basically typical suburban attire but ripped and dingy, topped with military short haircuts.”[18]

The New Folk?

Greg Ginn expressed that the band was more than just an outlet for aggression when he said,

“[w]e do want to provide a physical and emotional release, but we also want to create an atmosphere where people are encouraged to think for themselves rather than accept what they’ve been told.”[19]

 

It is this ideology that has caused some to compare the Los Angeles hardcore movement of the late 70’s and early 80’s with the folk musicians of the mid-late 60’s. In her 1980 documentary on the LA punk scene, The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris interviewed Brendan Mullen owner of the short lived L.A. club the Masque, who stated

“Some of the better of the punk bands that developed into sort of like folk music. I don’t mean folk music as in traditional folk music, but the allegory can be drawn in the sixties when protestors used acoustic guitars. Now instead of acoustic guitars they have high speed, 300 beats a minuet speed rock. And, uh, yelling about the same things. About how their air is poisoned out there [points to downtown LA over his shoulder]. The air in utopia is poisoned. Ya know, the final joke.”[20]

 

Mullen seems to be right because even today underground punk scenes across the country tend to have some of the most radical stances on important political issues.

Conclusion

It would be hard to find a band so diametrically opposed to The Beach Boys than Black Flag. While they never attained the wide popularity of The Beach Boys, Black Flag have come to be a very influential band to both underground and mainstream artists. It is interesting to see that a band like Black Flag that formed in the same South Bay area of Los Angeles only 15 years after The Beach Boys could turn out so completely different. It shows that Los Angeles, and indeed the country was changing. American youth were disillusioned with the Reagan administration and the ‘American Dream’. Black Flag became spokespersons for Los Angeles and helped to modify how the world viewed the Southern California experience. They probably did not (and most likely could never) dissolve the cloud of sunny idealism that The Beach Boys formed over LA life, but they did poke some holes in it so that the world could peek in on some of the more harsh realities of living in the smog-choked, police enforced (sub)urban sprawl of the 1980’s.

  Bibliography 

American Hardcore: The History of American Punk Rock 1980-1986. DVD. Dir.

Paul Rachman. Writ. Steven Blush. Sony Pictures, 2007. 100 min.

Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life. New York: Little, Brown and

Company, 2001.

Beach Boys, The. Pet Sounds. Capitol 26266, 1966.

Black Flag. The First Four Years. SST CD 021. 1983.

Decline of the Western Civilization, The. VHS. Dir. Penelope Spheeris. Spheeris

Films, Inc., 1981. 100 min.

Forming: The Early Days of L.A. Punk. Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 1999.

Klosterman, Chuck. Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth

Daköta. New York: Scribner, 2001.

Rollins, Henry. Get In The Van: On the Road with Black Flag. Los Angeles:           

2.13.61 Publications, Inc. 1994, 2^nd ed. 2004.

  

[More]

Ian Fowles

5-1-07

TDNY 401

Los Angeles

  Black Flag: Damaging the Southern California Image  Intro

While reading and reflecting on Taylor Smith’s essay and presentation on The Beach Boys, I began thinking about how certain bands become representatives for their hometown. Bruce Springsteen was the poster boy of Asbury Park, New Jersey. Black Sabbath embodied working class Birmingham, England. When I thought about bands that have come from the Los Angeles area since The Beach Boys, it became clear that there was one band that stood out as not only the complete polar opposite of them in almost every way, but also portrayed L.A. and the southern California experience completely different. That band was Black Flag.

Background

Black Flag was formed by guitarist Greg Ginn in 1976 in the same South Bay area of Los Angeles County that The Beach Boys hailed from. The band originally called themselves ‘Panic’ after the style of their songs which had very fast tempos and very short durations. Soon, however they found another band had already taken the name. At the suggestion of Ginn’s younger brother and band artist who went by ‘Raymond Pettibon’, they then donned the moniker Black Flag. Pettibon had designed a logo for them consisting of four vertical bars that looked like a rippling flag in the wind. Michael Azerrad notes the significance of the band’s new name,

“If a white flag means surrender, it was plain what a black flag meant; a black flag is also a recognized symbol of anarchy, not to mention the traditional emblem of pirates; it sounded a bit like their heroes Black Sabbath as well. Of course, the fact that Black Flag was also a popular insecticide didn’t hurt either. ‘We were comfortable with all the implications of the name,’ says Ginn, ‘as well as it just sounded, you know, heavy.’”[1]

 

This ‘heaviness’ was an essential part of both the Black Flag sound and image. Being influenced by bands like the Ramones, MC5, and Iggy Pop, Black Flag took punk rock to a new level and pioneered a sound that came to be called ‘hardcore’. Their music was an outlet to work out the tensions and issues that they encountered in their bland L.A. suburban existence. They did not identify with the surf culture championed by The Beach Boys. “Ginn disdained the conformity and materialism of surfing…he preferred to write poetry and do ham radio.”[2] In fact Black Flag’s music

“was a harsh wake-up call for the California dream: for all the perfect weather and affluent lifestyles, there was something gnawing at its youth. Los Angeles wasn’t a sun-splashed utopia anymore – it was an alienated, smog-choked sprawl rife with racial and class tensions, recession, and stifling boredom.”[3]

 

It wasn’t long until this sentiment was being voiced by other adolescents across the country. In 1979 Black Flag released their first EP called Nervous Breakdown which became the template for the national hardcore punk scene to follow. In January 1982 the band released Damaged their first full length LP with Greg Ginn and vocalist Henry Rollins becoming the most permanent members of the group.

“Damaged made a fairly big impact in Europe and England…who were fascinated by the revelation that there was a really radical punk rock scene developing in the beach communities of Southern California, which they previously looked on as an idyllic promised land, seemingly the last place where kids would flip a musical middle finger at society. ‘And it caused certain people to think, ‘Well, is this legitimate?’’ says Ginn. ‘There’s that element of ‘This is wrong, coming from this place. People like that should be coming from Birmingham, England. You guys have it good.’ But when you’re surrounded by Genesis fans, I don’t know how idyllic that is. When you’re surrounded by that materialistic kind of a thing and you’re looking for something deeper than that, then that’s not an ideal environment.”[4]

 

Not only was Black Flag’s music a stylistic middle finger to modern mainstream rock bands like Journey, Foghat, and Peter Frampton, but also a cultural one as well. In a way Black Flag had a mission to undo the work The Beach Boys had done in idealizing Southern California to the world. They had to let people know the new reality of living in LA in the 1980’s under Reaganomics.

Equality

The band was plagued with numerous lineup changes throughout their career, which also became a trend in hardcore bands to follow. It is interesting to notice that Black Flag reflected the racial diversity and open-mindedness of Los Angeles in their personnel changes. One could even call Black Flag an equal opportunity band. Singer Chavo Pederast (born Ron Reyes) was Puerto Rican, drummer ROBO (born Roberto Valverde) was Columbian, and producer Spot (born Glenn Lockett) was African American. Additionally, in their most prolific recording and touring years (1983-1985), female bassist Kira Roessler (who often played in a dress) held down the bottom end of the rhythm section.

Musical Style

Compared to The Beach Boys, Black Flag was an aural assault on the ears. There are no angelic choruses and high harmonized vocal melodies. There are no nice sounding guitars and keyboards. The Black Flag sound was characterized by loud, highly distorted guitars, vocals that were more screaming than singing, pounding bass and frenetic drumming. It was powerful and abrasive music, perhaps the foremost of its time. Chris Doherty, singer of Boston based hardcore band Gang Green recalls the hardcore style that Black Flag forged. He said “we weren’t singing, we were just screaming against authority and our parents and everything that was pissing us off in our lives.”[5] Just as The Beach Boys used their everyday activities as inspiration for songs, so did Black Flag; only times had changed in America.

Lyrical Content

            While in 1966 The Beach boys sang “God only knows what I’d be without you”[6], in 1980 Black Flag sang “I’ve got no values, might as well blow you away.”[7] Keith Morris, Black Flag’s first vocalist recalls how “the music we were performing, the lyrics that we were writing, had nothing to do with holding hands and smiling and skipping off into the sunset.”[8] They sang about their experience of boredom, depression, and alienation in L.A.’s suburban wasteland. With song titles such as ‘Depression’, ‘Nervous Breakdown’, ‘American Waste’, ‘You Bet We’ve Got Something Personal Against You!’, ‘Life of Pain’, ‘Thirsty and Miserable’ Black Flag shoved their discontent in the public’s face. Their songs were adolescent (and post-adolescent) angst and turmoil in musical form. Black Flag would often play with bands like Fear and X who had a similar loathing for the big city of L.A. The lyrics for X’s song “Los Angeles” describe either an immigrant or tourist who had to get out of L.A. because she couldn’t stand the racial, sexual, and class diversity of the place. Fear’s anti-L.A. “I Love Livin’ in the City” is a sarcastic rant about the dark and dirty side of the city, including lists of disgusting sights and smells one can encounter in the slums. However, they boys in Fear would much rather live in L.A. than New York City. In their song “New York’s Alright if You Like Saxophones”, vocalist Lee Ving (born Lee James Capalero) lists the things that he finds repulsive about New York, such as freezing to death or being pushed in front of the subway.

The roughness of the streets of Los Angeles would be a theme that would reappear in the L.A. glam metal scene in the mid to late 1980’s. It was a scene that was directly influenced by Black Flag and their contemporaries[9]. Bands like Guns N’ Roses, Poison, and Mötley Crüe often produced songs that spoke of the evils of life on the streets of Hollywood/L.A. The main themes dealt with corruption, violence, and filth of L.A. and the fate of those naive souls who were transformed through moving here. Unlike most L.A. punk and hardcore acts, the members of most metal bands were transplants to Southern California. For example, no member of the original lineup of Guns N’ Roses was born or raised in L.A. These songs were their own lived experiences as well as that of friends and bandmates who had migrated to Los Angeles from other parts of the country and had their eyes opened to the true grit of the big city. Poison’s tune “Fallen Angel” is about a disillusioned small town girl becoming a whore after arriving in the big city. Mötley Crüe’s track “Dr. Feelgood” is about a drug lord who is the one really running the city streets. Guns N’ Roses had songs like “Welcome to the Jungle”, “Paradise City”, and “Move to the City”. A close inspection of the lyrics to these particular songs is telling, especially given the fact vocalist/lyricist W. Axl Rose was born and raised in rural Lafayette, Indiana and moved to L.A. at 20 years old. Rock critic/journalist Chuck Klosterman believes however, that “Axl clearly loved the concept of Los Angeles, even if he constantly sang about how disgusting it was.”[10] Again, this is the love/hate relationship that the 70’s punks had with the place, and most likely reflects the views of many other citizens of the L.A. region.

Live Performance

The live performance for Black Flag was meant as a site of a cathartic release, but after a while touring became exhausting to both band members and audience. On a tour in 1984 they coined the term for their theory of live performance as ‘the blasting concept’ which was an all out “sonic assault on the audience.”[11] A live concert could literally be punishing for attendees not only because of volume and duration of the performance, but also dealing with youths ‘slam dancing’ – a new and aggressive form of dancing forged in the clubs of Los Angeles that caused participants to collide in circular motions on the floor, often sustaining injuries.

There were many times in Los Angeles where hardcore punk shows would end with the police breaking up the event, and occasionally in a riot of violence or police brutality. Even just living in LA as a young ‘punk rocker’ in that time could be scary. In singer Henry Rollins’ journal from his years in Black Flag he writes

“I’m scared to walk around my neighborhood in L.A. I’m afraid of getting picked up by the pigs. I’ve had enough fucked up experiences at night with them. I’m afraid of getting picked up and getting the shit beaten out of me by the swine.”[12]

 

Black Flag was not the first band to draw Johnny Law’s attention in Los Angeles. Bands like Fear, The Circle Jerks, The Germs, and X had already been dealing with their abusive authority for a few years. Ginn even claimed that phones had been tapped and plainclothes officers had been following band members on occasion.

Recording

            Taylor spoke of the recording techniques that The Beach Boys used which made their music ‘sparkle’ like aural sunshine. Their songs were recorded and mixed in such a fashion that the final product lacked bass and low frequencies. For Black Flag however, the opposite effect was sought after and achieved. If The Beach Boys music sounded like sunshine, then the music of Black Flag is the sound of darkness. There was even darkness inherent in their chosen band name. They wanted a sound that was low, ‘heavy’, and ‘metallic’. This soundscape more accurately reflected their experience of living in the city of angels. Azerrad notes that as time went on, “[t]he sound got much more metallic and sludgy, with Ginn anchoring the music with bottom-heavy bass-and-guitar formations.”[13] Things were heavy as opposed to light; the members of Black Flag felt like they were being crushed by the weight of the city and its institutions and devices. The ‘metallic’ sound reflected the built environment of freeways and buildings, not the natural panorama of the beach and the ocean endorsed so highly by South Bay alumni The Beach Boys. Through this new sound, Black Flag were creating a voice for their own and subsequent generations.

Black Flag’s records were of a consistent low fidelity quality due mainly to their lack of a descent budget to record on the best and latest equipment. However, this rawness adds a heavy characteristic to their sound that might have been missing had they been able to record in a major studio with a big-name producer who would most likely have tried to sterilize their sound. Black Flag didn’t wait around for a major label to offer them a contract either. They knew if they wanted a record pressed they would have to do it themselves. Thus SST Records was born. SST stood for Solid State Transmitters because Ginn was an amateur at ham radio. SST became the model for underground labels across the country to emulate, such as Dischord, Frontier, Posh Boy, and New Alliance. SST released records by such influential bands as The Minutemen, the Descendents[14], Bad Brains, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr., among others.

Image

Black Flag portrayed a very somber image. The artwork on their flyers and record covers spoke to their suburban teenage angst and dissatisfaction. Guitarists Greg Ginn’s brother, under the pseudonym Raymond Pettibon, was the bands primary graphic artist. “Pettibon’s pen-and-ink artwork was a perfect visual analogue to the music it promoted – gritty, stark, violent, smart, provocative, and utterly American.”[15] Singer Henry Rollins reflected on the artistic image of Black Flag in a recent documentary called American Hardcore, where he said

“Black Flag had this austere, kind of, very earnest/serious thing about them that made you kind of respect it—be in awe of it. The band had a logo. The band had a look. The four bars. It was really all very overwhelming. And just had this intense take on things. They had a political agenda.”[16]

 

Flyers often included blatantly offensive material containing controversial images of public figures and taboo subjects that pushed the limits of convention and decency, which is part of what the hardcore subculture was about. The visual art of L.A. hardcore and punk flyers were

“all the craft of a hastily scribbled note left on the kitchen table by someone running out on an errand…Punk graphics…were hit-and-run because things were moving fast then and it was all about getting information across. Shows were organized, promoted, and presented in a matter of days…all were conceived and brought to fruition quickly and on minimal funds…In classic dada tradition, punks rejected the Academy and drew instead from ‘low’ sources: graffiti, underground comics, advertising, car culture, the tarot, blaxploitation, bondage and pornography, surf culture, fifties industrial films, Mad magazine, and the universe of American detritus that winds up in thrift stores. It all got tossed in the blender, and though the results were often visually crude, they were invariably witty.”[17]

 

On stage, the attire of Black Flag couldn’t be farther from the Pendletons

(and later, the Hawaiian print shirts) of The Beach Boys. Black Flag were so poor that they would receive bags of second hand clothes from Goodwill and Salvation Army type stores that guitarist Ginn’s father would buy for them by the pound for pennies. Hardcore ‘fashion’ “was basically typical suburban attire but ripped and dingy, topped with military short haircuts.”[18]

The New Folk?

Greg Ginn expressed that the band was more than just an outlet for aggression when he said,

“[w]e do want to provide a physical and emotional release, but we also want to create an atmosphere where people are encouraged to think for themselves rather than accept what they’ve been told.”[19]

 

It is this ideology that has caused some to compare the Los Angeles hardcore movement of the late 70’s and early 80’s with the folk musicians of the mid-late 60’s. In her 1980 documentary on the LA punk scene, The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris interviewed Brendan Mullen owner of the short lived L.A. club the Masque, who stated

“Some of the better of the punk bands that developed into sort of like folk music. I don’t mean folk music as in traditional folk music, but the allegory can be drawn in the sixties when protestors used acoustic guitars. Now instead of acoustic guitars they have high speed, 300 beats a minuet speed rock. And, uh, yelling about the same things. About how their air is poisoned out there [points to downtown LA over his shoulder]. The air in utopia is poisoned. Ya know, the final joke.”[20]

 

Mullen seems to be right because even today underground punk scenes across the country tend to have some of the most radical stances on important political issues.

Conclusion

It would be hard to find a band so diametrically opposed to The Beach Boys than Black Flag. While they never attained the wide popularity of The Beach Boys, Black Flag have come to be a very influential band to both underground and mainstream artists. It is interesting to see that a band like Black Flag that formed in the same South Bay area of Los Angeles only 15 years after The Beach Boys could turn out so completely different. It shows that Los Angeles, and indeed the country was changing. American youth were disillusioned with the Reagan administration and the ‘American Dream’. Black Flag became spokespersons for Los Angeles and helped to modify how the world viewed the Southern California experience. They probably did not (and most likely could never) dissolve the cloud of sunny idealism that The Beach Boys formed over LA life, but they did poke some holes in it so that the world could peek in on some of the more harsh realities of living in the smog-choked, police enforced (sub)urban sprawl of the 1980’s.

  Bibliography 

American Hardcore: The History of American Punk Rock 1980-1986. DVD. Dir.

Paul Rachman. Writ. Steven Blush. Sony Pictures, 2007. 100 min.

Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life. New York: Little, Brown and

Company, 2001.

Beach Boys, The. Pet Sounds. Capitol 26266, 1966.

Black Flag. The First Four Years. SST CD 021. 1983.

Decline of the Western Civilization, The. VHS. Dir. Penelope Spheeris. Spheeris

Films, Inc., 1981. 100 min.

Forming: The Early Days of L.A. Punk. Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 1999.

Klosterman, Chuck. Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth

Daköta. New York: Scribner, 2001.

Rollins, Henry. Get In The Van: On the Road with Black Flag. Los Angeles:           

2.13.61 Publications, Inc. 1994, 2^nd ed. 2004.

  

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...see my response in the Files section...

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Taylor Smith TNDY 401T response to Jessie’s mid-term Chilling Out with the Drive-Time Ranters As a musician, I imagine that my initial reaction to Jessie’s mid-term project was a little different than that of others. Jessie’s paper outlined the typical plight of the Los Angeles commuter. She gave information on the sheer magnitude of those involved. She focused her discussion on the psychological affects this ritual has. Clearly almost no one wins with the added stress and environmental impacts L.A.’s commuters are forced to deal with. Unfortunately, there seems no end in sight, as real estate development continues to boom and public transportation’s development continues to shuffle its feet. It would be interesting to study if, indeed, the psychological affects are improved with the use of public transportation. My initial reaction was twofold. First, my mind was drawn toward Muzak, Inc. and its goals of numbing the psychological affects of work-related stress. My second reaction was at public media, and specifically the medium of radio. Radio broadcasters are more than aware of how much time commuters spend in their cars, and schedule their programming accordingly. Unfortunately, the goals of both Muzak and radio broadcasters are almost exactly opposite, and neither of them are affective at bettering the situation. There is not really time to cover the whole history of Muzak, but suffice it to say that Muzak was developed as a way of coaxing more productivity out of employees. As the industrial revolution rolled forth and came to full fruition in the early 20th century, it became clear that, among other things, the average employee’s job had become extremely mundane. Muzak, was an attempt to mask the monotony by playing soft, mellowing instrumental music in the work area. Its initial reactions and effects were overwhelmingly positive. Workers reported feeling much less burdened and employers reported a huge gain in productivity while Muzak was being played. These principles carried over into corporate, office-type, environments as well, with a great number of cubicles being wired to receive this “stimulation.” In fact, in the 1940s Muzak ran experiments into the times of the day when employees found themselves the least motivated and the least productive and coupled this with research into what types of aural stimuli best promoted productivity. Muzak then began programming their service around this data. The radio medium didn’t have quite such Marxist beginnings. As we are to discuss L. A., I will try to succinctly discuss its situation in Los Angeles. It is very clear that radio stations are aware of the time spent by the average Angeleno in commuting to and from work. There are basically two types of radio programming: talk/news radio and music broadcasts. Both of these genres of radio purposely manipulate their schedules around the “drive time.” With the “talk-radio” stations, it is typical to put the most provocative, controversial, and loudest commentators (or “shock jocks”) on the air between 6:00 and 9:00 a.m. and again from 4:00 – 7:00 p.m. The likes of Bill Handel and Howard Stern grace the Los Angeles morning airwaves during these slots. This is done, I suppose, because these stations have a, more or less, captive audience, which is, for the most part, already overly stressed. These stations take advantage of this fact and provoke, even further, the stress levels of their listeners. One can only imagine the blood pressures that would result. Instead of making the drudgeries of commuting as relaxing as possible, the talk-radio market only further provokes the problem. With music-based stations the situation is similar. Many of these stations, in fact, will abandon their music play lists altogether in the morning drive time, replacing it with mindless chatter from the DJs. One will notice, also, that during this drive time, the newsbreaks and weather reports come at nearly twice the frequency than during the normal broadcast. It is as if these stations are trying to wake up the sleepy drivers and bombard them with stress so that they will be primed when they arrive at work! Los Angeles is in probably the worst position in regard to these practices. It is a huge metropolitan city with its work force coming, often, from far-flung enclaves. Its residents pay far too much for their homes and services, yet many of their jobs pay nearly the same as their contemporaries in more affordable communities. These poor Angelenos suffer from enough stress-inducing stimuli as it is, they definitely don’t need some potty-mouthed ga-zillionaire making it worse!

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“Evening in LA”: Wicked and Cuban Restaurant

  

  

On April 29^th, 2007, I joined “Evening in LA,” an event held by Minority Mentor Program at CGU. The event included a martini show of the musical Wicked followed by dinner at a Cuban restaurant nearby. In the beginning, I assumed that both the musical and a Cuban restaurant were “selected” to represent L.A. by MMP staffs, since the title of the event was “Evening in LA” after all. It seemed to be an interesting but reasonable choice, because Wicked is based on The Wizard of Oz, which immediately reminded me of Hollywood, and a Cuban restaurant stood for the ethnic diversity of L.A. I also expected to meet many international students and planned to ask their impression of LA.

However, it turned out that all my assumptions were wrong. At the moment I talk to the supervisor of the event, I learnt that neither the choice of the show nor of the restaurant was so conscious at all. She told me that she simply chose Wicked because the participants of the MMP program recommended it. The restaurant was chosen because one of the MMP staffs knew their manager personally and could arrange the dinner at a discounted price. Among the twenty people who joined the trip, only five were not American citizens (they were from South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Equador, and Saudi Arabia): the rest was African Americans or Hispanic American citizens. Most of them have been to L.A. many times. I talk to them on our way to L.A., and found out strange fact that no one considered the ““Evening in LA” as about L.A. Some of them were excided to see the musical; most of them are looking forward to the dinner.

In the Pantages Theatre, before the show started, I attempted a conversation with a woman standing next to me while waiting in a line to use restroom. She said she that she lived in L.A., had seen this musical before, but came again to show it to her son (who was out of mi sight all the time).

In intermission I found two middle-aged women from South Korea and exchanged a lengthier conversation in Korean. They were on a package tour arranged by a Korean tourist company. They said that they dropped out from their group to see the musical instead of visiting other places, such as Korea Town and China Town. One of them said that she did not need to visit China Town because she already knew what it looked like: she had “seen it on TA.” I asked them how they liked L.A., and was answered: “Hollywood (by which they probably meant Universal Studios) was great!” It seemed that L.A., to them, was an assembly of tourist spots and events such as Universal Studios, Korea Town, China Town, beach, and musical. They liked both Universal Studios and Wicked (so far), and therefore they found L.A. very satisfying. However, it was not just L.A.: after a few more minutes of listening to them, I found that they perceived the entire U.S. in the similar way. As they said, “the U.S. and Korea are not so different these days.” Then what is the point of spending money to travel the U.S. other than to “see what they don’t have in Korea?” Two days were their entire stay in L.A. Next morning, they were leaving for San Francisco, where they were going to stay less than a day.

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Rebecca Campana
Los Angeles Lit
Final Response II

From Music to Print Culture: how the Internet Swallows Local Business


After reading Ian Fowles’ paper, I could not help but project his concern for the disappearing music store onto a subject that is near and dear to my heart: print culture. Fowles makes an excellent point that the Darwin effect has caused the closure of many music stores, due to the increase in availability of downloadable music (Fowles, 2). The idea that our culture is already moving to the point where people prefer the quick convenience of downloading music through a few mouse-clicks, rather than opting for the community and inter-personal contact of an actual store is a frightening projection for the future of books, newspapers, magazines, and graphic novels.

When the Internet Attacks
I first noticed this trend when looking through my father’s old dissertation research library (which takes up one full wall of our den). For his writing on epistemology of religion, he had acquired over 37 different Bibles and just as many concordances, not to mention hundreds of volumes of other historical and analytical texts. I asked him one day why he bought so many of them, rather than renting from the library or making copies of certain chapters that he needed. He told me that many books were recommended or given to him by advisors, and were not available in local libraries. He also pointed out that none of his research material for his entire dissertation was available online, as the Internet did not exist yet.
I realized how spoiled I have become with the Internet these days; during religion courses, I used an online concordance that would look up any word or phase I needed with the simple click of a button. At CGU, some of my instructors conveniently place one or two chapters online for their classes that are accessible from any computer at any time. Coupling this with the fact that journals, newspapers, and magazines have searchable online databases led me to the startling revelation that there is barely a need to even enter a library anymore! 
With the internet’s many uses (gaming, networking, watching movies, etc.), children and teenagers are spending their free time online, rather than reading. In fact, reading has become something that is necessary only for school these days. With the institution of a required 15 minutes of Sustained Silent Reading per day in some southern California school districts, it is apparent that children are not receiving enough encouragement to read on their own time; the fact that schools have to take the time to actually require children to spend time reading means that there is not enough emphasis on teaching them to want to read on their own.
One market that has been practically obliterated by the internet is the sale and trading of rare or collectable books. In the past, one had to seek out a bookstore that featured the sale of rare books and hope that it carried the sought-after volume. Today, however, one must merely open a website like ebay.com, abebooks.com, or ugenie.com to search international buyers’ databases for a desired book. While this might be ideal for the avid collector, it removes the personal aspect from the equation; no longer must one interact with a local bookseller or speak with others who are also book-hunting.

The Changing Face of the Bookstore
In the past few years, Borders and Barnes & Noble have bought out many of the smaller, independently-owned bookstores. Waldenbooks, for example, bought by publicly-owned Borders Group Inc. in 1994, is still in the process of closing out or transferring ownership of most of their locations (WHECnews.com). In order to diversify and boost revenue, these companies have formed a business partnership with companies such as Seattle’s Best, Starbucks, and TMobile  to open cafes with wifi inside their stores. The offer of a good cup of coffee while one takes a working lunch or does homework with a group of friends is enticing to many different types of people. Often on weekends local jazz or classical groups will perform within the stores, which draw in another crowd of people. While these events might not be directly related to books or the printed word, they certainly attract money and visibility, which no shareholder will complain about.

The Little Bookstores that Could
    One of the oldest bookstores in the Los Angeles area is Books Inc., which was founded in 1851. Since that time, it has burned down twice, moved locations three times, and filed bankruptcy two times. After being forced to close ten of its twelve stores in 1997, its future was uncertain, but the owners made enough good investments to reopen nine more stores. Today, according to its website, “Books Inc. serves as a shining example that independent bookselling can survive and prosper, even if we must dance among the elephants” (Booksinc.net).
    Local Mrs. Nelson’s bookshop in La Verne, CA has also kept its head above water during the recent corporate takeover of most other stores. Mrs. Nelson’s has a unique strategy, however: it caters to school districts all over southern California by offering to hold children’s book fairs on their campuses as fundraisers. The hosting school receives 30% of the profits, and Mrs. Nelson’s representatives bring all the books, shelves, signage, equipment, and staff necessary to run the event. This is a benefit to local communities as well as to the schools and the bookstore itself.
    More well-known Vroman’s bookstores in Pasadena have also had takeover attempts by Barnes & Noble and Borders Group. It is a wonder, still, that these two locations in the same city are able to survive within walking distance of both a Barnes & Noble/Starbucks and a Borders store location. Again, the small-town appeal draws more business because of the promise of individual attention from an employee who has a passion for books, as well as a desire to help others discover an excitement about reading and learning.


If you can’t beat them…
One of my favorite childhood vacations was when my family drove up the coast of California to Oregon with the end goal of reaching Powell’s bookstore in Portland. Powells is one of the largest independently-owned bookstores left in the United States. It is a seven-story building, practically wallpapered with books, that has maintained its private, homey mood. Its quiet atmosphere appeals to visiting students and teachers, while the children’s wing has enough to entice even the most stubborn child to pick up a book.
While Powells draws travelers from all over the world, one main reason it has not closed its doors is because it offers incentives to Portland locals. One whole section of both website and store is dedicated to offering the work of local authors and musicians. The artists are invited to set up tables and sign copies of their work, and local buyers are given discounts in the stores. When a company invests directly in its own community, the community members will eagerly respond!
Powell’s has also managed to survive, despite attempted buyouts by larger public companies, in part because it has joined the Internet craze. Powells.com offers a searchable database of books that rivals those of Borders/Amazon and Barnes & Noble in its selection and promise of quick delivery. There is even an option for individuals to request a hard-to-find volume and a staff member will be in direct communication while attempting to locate it.
While the homey atmosphere and promise of individual attention might draw some customers away from larger chains, it is unlikely that many of these stores will survive much longer. With the ever-improving appeal of the internet, it seems much more likely that the independently-owned bookstores in Los Angeles will join ghostly ranks of other closed stores like Manhattan’s Murder Ink, Dallas’ Black Images Book Bazaar (the state’s oldest African-American bookstore), and Pella’s Main Street Books (punkplanet.com). As these local neighborhood landmarks go the way of the independent record stores described by Ian Fowles, Los Angeles will lose some true gems and historical locations that played a part in the original development of the city and its surrounding area.

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