Amoeba Music, 6400 Sunset Blvd.
Friday, January 18, 2008; 2:56pm
“Comic writers don’t have to invent characters. The funniest people are all around you, in the streetcars, on the sidewalk, everywhere. Keep your eyes open.” – Winsor McCay, 1924
Camped outside on the concrete embankment jutting out of Sunset Blvd.’s Amoeba Music awaits a perfect crow’s nest for an observer to commit auscultation on this booming music/DVD haberdashery. What a spot to listen well to the very breathing of this place so alive with a kaleidoscopic diaspora—the very corn of LA’s flocculent cream.
And thiestes be damned when they read our suppositions!
Strange that they call themselves “Amoeba.” But maybe not. (NB: The name “Amoeba” comes from the original planners of the store back up in Berkeley. They had wanted to start a band called “Amoeba,” being that they formed said group outside of such a repository of scholastic whateverness. They instead decided to open a record store, and there you go.) Maybe they knew all along…
Come inside, children, and feel the welcoming warmth of the Chocolate Factory. Here, even an apathetic grimace really means: “We welcome you. You’re one of us, we’re one of you, would you like a bag? Meet me at the other side.” Amoeba gives us what the Internet promises—classless Utopia—without, unlike the cold Internet, being rendered anonymous or at least faceless.
No Halloween masks or facades here. A beautifully eschatological answer to the City is Amoeba. Miscegenation: mix and be free of the shackles hampering us outside, from a modern society bent on creating divisions, bent on polarization and stratification (from both the Right and Left, thank you). Once inside those glass doors, it don’t matter no more: black white male female rich poor Hip Square Christian fairy.
And speaking of which, there she is: the strawberry-blonde pixie with broken wings—a broken-down Fiona Apple trammeled by the harshness of the world, without Ms. Apple’s airbag of support (fame/money/admiration/notoriety). Our girl is paler, but brighter: a survivor “in spite of…”. More experienced, sophisticated. Bolder. And, yet, this gossamer veneer of stability is so easily torn.
Save her vs. the Grand Orgy inside Amoeba—that Hip sensibility that indeed Marx was right, that without God, all things are permissible. At least, the illusion of this in the magical castle run by children who pretend (and indeed almost seem) to be adults. The grand copulation of culture/genre/people. Truly and finally a Themerican consommé.
And there she is, right where we left her, milling about the place as a night elf for the shoemaker. Green knit hoodie, black tight jeans, tiniest little head coming up to your sternum, black saddle shoes covering pastel-colored argyle socks. She’s talking to one of the cashier folkle, one of her brethren elves. You almost feel as though she will need to lift herself up on the counter to get ahead. But, no. She needn’t. She’s in charge, for the moment. You can tell by her eyes, who have no color and never will (though they may have, once a long time ago).
We’re stuck at the incredibly helpful Information Counter, where we find yet more examples of Amoeba’s wondrous possibilities for miscegenation at its highest yield. Here we have a black guy who speaks Spanish and knows “World Music.” A Dominican, perhaps, clean-shaven and wearing an equally clean blue polo shirt with an effulgent Amoeba sticker slapped on the left breast. Curious dark eyes.
He’s speaking—in Spanish—to Cain Fonseca, of the world-famous Kids of Widney High. Cain is blind and mentally-retarded, but his smile wins the affection of girls and boys outside of Amoeba, so in here, it’s of no wonder that he has his own triumvirate of staff—the Dominican, “Tim” (who wears his glasses and shaved head in militant fashion and looks to be ready to get in a fight, but won’t… at least whilst in these hallowed halls), and “Santo,” who looks to be a fey Mexican with yellow shirt and thin body—all working to help Cain find what he’s looking for in both World Music (speaking Spanish, thank you) and in Country (“Charlie Sack,” whom no one in the entire story can find, even when enlisting the assistance of the computer).
Behind us, a waify sylph model bitch in cowboy boots and green dress that appears ready to be employed as a cupcake wrapper. Streaked brown/blonde hair and a black leather satchel purse that could be used by a moll of a motorcycle gang (or perhaps by the other fella at the Information Desk who looks about ready to get into a scuffle himself, what with that Brian Setzer hep-cat haircut, tattooed arms, and black leather everything else).
50’s rockabilly on the speakers, so it all makes sense in the end. That, and the plangent waves whooshing around us, of thousands of plastic cases being shuffled majestically. Plastic cases that the blind Cain would say “smell of perfume.” But, don’t mind him, unless you’re interested in smelling them yourself. He’s busy anyway, what with yet another helper coming to the fore: “Sorry, I looked through all the ‘Charlie’ names on the computer, and I can’t find any ‘Charlie Sack.’ “
Cain could care less, as he—a strange product of miscegenation in his own way: Mexidisablind—at once is whisked away by Santo to grab his CD’s from World Music, Santo and Cain jabbering away in that cackling fast-speak of Mexienglish. Themerica the Bald!
We purchase our piece of the consommé, exit through the airport-security-esque detectors, and come out the other side to the limbo separating the Chocolate Factory from Charlie Bucket’s England. Go past the porcine, bearded, bespectacled young gentleman up at the last security check before the exit door. He wears a golf hat turned forward and smiles/nods down at us reassuringly: “Good luck, gentlemen,” it’s as though he issues forth.
Yes, back out into the Blare of the Real. Los Angeles, Sunset Blvd. Oy. Still, remnants of our adventure inside, of the sense of unity and brilliant galvanization of Amoeba Music: a young girl outside (appearing ready to star in a Russ Meyer movie, if she would only take Steroids) bunched in a ball, on her cell phone, perhaps crying. She stares at us, knows we’re watching her, knows whatever might be going wrong, she’s us, and we are she. After all, her back does touch the great wall of Amoeba, painted in perfect ecstatic peace chaos.
Perhaps the whole of LA, perhaps Themerica at large could be so unified. But, such cultural nirvana will most likely never come, as per the great writer Flannery Carver Billings’ musing: “With so many boat-rockers aboard, it’s of no wonder that this vessel of ours keeps traveling in circles.”
Photo vic Flickr
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1 response so far ↓
1 Emberly Modine // Jan 20, 2008 at 11:39 am
i have had a similar experience in home depot.
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