Art in the World

Sitting in the car while Don goes to a bank in Beverly Hills, an upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles, I note that most people get out of their expensive cars wearing comfy pants. Here is a girl in glasses, her long hair gleaming, driving a BMW, and wearing body-hugging maroon leotard pants. Here is a tall, silver-haired man getting out of a high-end Range Rover wearing, yes, sweatpants! It’s okay. They can wear whatever they want. They’re not in the frame.

Los Angeles, like New York, is all about art and artifice. I have loved the casualness of the city. In summer, I can run around in a t-shirt, ragged jeans and tevas with no fear that the sun will disappear or a wind come up. So it is partly the weather. But it is also a lack of pretension. And a knowledge that nothing outside the frame matters.

Anyone who has been on a movie set knows that outside the square the camera lens has in its sights, are fluffy booms to catch the sound, various kinds of lights and hordes of people dressed in noiseless black. They are not in the frame. Even within the frame, the focus is on a particular plane. Items in the background may be blurred out. When the picture is prepared for your edification and amusement, you are taken in, enveloped by the scene, imagining yourself in the seamless story. It has become art.

What’s outside the frame, outside the story, doesn’t matter. This is also true on stage. Lights direct your attention to the proscenium, around which the audience is ranged. Music draws you in. You might feel like the only one for whom the drama is playing out. But the costumes are ripped up the back, the sets are painted plywood and the lights are hidden in the uppermost reaches of the stage. Artifice rules. This is well understood in Los Angeles. Between scintillating, dramatic evening dress and sweatpants, there isn’t much. Nothing else matters.

When I arrived in San Francisco in the late 1960’s, it was the opposite. My friends and I weren’t well off, but we had energy, intelligence and imagination to burn and had come from places where these weren’t necessarily valued. It resulted in a democratizing of art and artifice. We wanted to make art of our lives, to find the most grounded and authentic ways of being we could, living as if everything mattered.

It is thus no surprise that the demand for whole, organic foods was stoked in the Bay Area, that people searched for and found all types of alternative therapies for mental and physical ailments, and that new kinds of theatre and music venues were created. We took traditional institutions and shook them upside down to see what remained. Computers created there have turned all of our lives around. Arguably, as well, global concern for planetary damage and loss of species was sparked by attempts to live in a more ecological fashion by those of us who took everything seriously, wholistically.

But things change. The downside of making art of your life is narcissism and navel-gazing. There is plenty of that in the Bay Area, which abounds in faux and deluded groups. The city of San Francisco lost its ability to sustain a young and upstart culture years ago when the tech companies took over and rents went sky-high. The downside of Los Angeles’ worship of the artistic frame is celebrity culture and stardom. If you don’t have classical features, if you don’t learn the artifice of making yourself camera-worthy, you will not be “seen.” Whole cultural groups get left out until all of a sudden they are the fashion!

I have lived in Los Angeles for only four years. Before that I lived in and around San Francisco for fifty. This is all the pedigree I have to make these sweeping statements! But I now see how these two essential California places differ, how they feed each other. I am thrilled that I get to watch.

My interest is always in the relationship each of us has with the world, how our inner world meets the outer one. James Hans defines this meeting as “taste.” He defines the world as first and foremost an aesthetic place and adds that the rhythms of our bodies are our fundamental mode of being in the world. “Artistic forms, sports, and other ritualized social activities help humans calibrate their bodily rhythms and allow them to achieve a measure of harmony in the world.” [The Sovereignty of Taste, 2002]

Whether or not we acknowledge it, our lives are driven by taste. Our secret thoughts and judgments about the physical world and each other can be described as our taste for the world and our place in it. Courtesy and compassion keep us from expressing everything our taste leads us to think. Intimacy and relationship are born when we find similar tastes in an other.

Don and I, of course, brought to Los Angeles our desire to live authentically. Everything matters, in our eyes, both in the frame and out of it. This makes for some demanding aspirations. Within the frame, i.e. in movies, books and music, we require content worth our time. Our brains look for beauty. Growth is normal to humans. As Steve Jobs said, “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive.” What goes into a frame should move us towards goodness, truth and beauty.

In terms of living, we recognize that the time has come to live simply. We make the effort to find organic food, to buy in bulk to avoid packaging and plastic and to patronize non-corporate restaurants. We use public transportation when possible and have only one car between us. And we try not to waste anything, including wearing our clothes into rags! In Los Angeles, water is a precious commodity, but we can get through the winter without much heat, layering on the sweaters. We don’t do as much tai chi as we would like,  but each of us swears by our mini-workouts.

So how are we doing at calibrating our bodily rhythms to current culture? Pretty well, thank you. And how about you?