Kulturkampf (North Park is Dead)
My X-Box 360 got a red ring of death last night. I found a gray hair this morning while applying my Rogaine… and North Park is dead!
It was a strange day. I woke up hungover. My brain felt like it was wrapped in gauze, working its way through a slow burn. My head felt obtuse, my hands clumsy. I grabbed my laundry and headed for the Laundromat. Powerlines hang over the city like a web. The clunk of my coins into the machine was satisfying. Mexicans eye me suspiciously. A bacon-wrapped hotdog from last night still sits in my gut like lead shot. The edges of my fingernails are still stained yellowish from the mustard. I sit there watching my clothes swirl in foam scratching away at the mustard stains until the skin starts to peel. A payphone seems almost out of place, progress has made it obsolete – a home for graffiti, a bed of disease. A dog barks. A horn honks. A black hooker buried in cellulite walks down the sidewalk. Her flabby body a sickening symphony of movement as everything seems to be trying to jiggle apart. Something is eating at me, eating at my gut. I meditate on the hollow rhythm of skateboard wheels across cracks in the cement. I see dirt around a doorknob. I smell boiling grease. Everything is moving slowly but intentionally. Flags hang limply like wilted lettuce atop their poles. Something is wrong. Something is very wrong. I am aware of it immediately. My god… North Park is dead!
That is the North Park that myself and everyone else who lives here has known has died. Overdosed, become strung out, washed up, and is being replaced by a double, an evil twin, a pod-person, a doppelganger. The North Park doppelganger inhabits the same physical space as the “old North Park”, walks the same streets, advertises the same values, but it is fundamentally different. Mutated and alien. It moves strangely, vaguely mimicking the behaviors of its ancestor yet without understanding the meaning of those behaviors. It uses the same vocabulary but not surprisingly the message is totally distorted. The insidious goals of this doppelganger are mostly unknown but the cultural transition of North Park from ascendancy to decline is sickeningly apparent.
First of all to clarify for everyone, by “North Park” I mean the North Park neighborhood in the city of San Diego. During the sixties and seventies it was a thriving business and shopping center. The economy shifted, North Park was left to suffer the brunt of this shift. The business district became home to dive bars, thrift stores, bowling alleys, 99 cent stores, strip-mall churches, and payday advance lenders. With the business district on life support, landlords and business owners alike were let their properties fall into a state of complete disrepair. In the midst of that disorder a seed of creativity and freedom was planted.
Artists moved in, punks and rockabillies screamed about blue collar strife, bums roamed the streets, queers kicked open bondage and video sex shops – the smell of leather mixing with the puke in the gutters. It became a creative mecca, a cultural nirvana, and my home.
The Chicken Pie Shop on El Cajon Blvd and the Donut Factory at the intersection of University Ave and 30th St (formerly known as “Hooker Donut”) were the most popular places to see transvestite prostitutes strut their wares late into the night. Bars like Scolari’s Office, the Zombie Lounge, Live Wire, the Whistle Stop, and the Red Fox Lounge offered a wide array of stiff cheap drinks and loud original music. The clientele varied from insane bums, stiletto heeled hookers, crust punks, greasy-haired rockabillies, shiftless artists, all the way to suit and tie wearing business people looking to drown their collective woes in raw reality.
All those places are now dead. Even though some of the structures still stand they have been taken over, incorporated by the tyrannical hippie ethos and a corporate hunger to “gentrify”. “Progress” is what they call it. Progress that crushes the individual in the name of homogeny. The original art smothered in mass production, the music drowned in vanilla, the freedom stolen repackaged and sold back to us all. The dichotomy is clear. The place has undergone a dramatic transformation. Crime has been replaced by hipsters. The bars filled with scenesters instead of residents. North Park is physically healthier yet culturally diseased. There is uniformity, certainty, predictability. Chain stores, Starbucks, people that don’t live here – don’t understand this place, don’t care about local values, don’t share our morals are running the place now. The place was an exploration of the individual, of reality, of raw experiences, a celebration of the importance of imagination, of art, of creativity. But now, it’s just dead.
Culture is a double helix. Two waves moving oppositely of each other. One wave rises while the other falls, one wave peaks as the other bottoms out. America is suffering its greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. The unemployment rate is higher than it’s been in twenty years (and risisng). There is a general lack of faith in the system, which is spiritually damning to a system based on faith. The image of America has deteriorated both at home and abroad.
Times of change can spawn moments of vast enlightenment. I often say that conflict, challenges, and tough choices are merely an opportunity to define oneself. Until the death of North Park, my home, many things never occurred to me in the way they do now. It had never occurred to me before how all of us on earth walk constantly over a seething crimson sea of flame hidden below in the belly of the earth. We never think of it. But what if the ground under our feet turned into glass and we were to suddenly see the raging furious hell below? When North Park died I became as glass. I saw within myself and I saw my rage.
We have lived through an epoch of suppression of the masses, and now we are living through an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses. North Park is suffering the dehumanizing consequences of imagination’s destruction. It was a great place, an exploration of the individual verses the social order, a celebration of the importance of creativity, art, independent music, and free thinking, but unfortunately (possibly inevitably) the social order has won out. Trampled the individual under the murderous stampede of a thousand wal-mart shoppers. In North Park not only is the individual being suppressed, but the identity of a place that celebrates individuality is being suppressed.
The most sprawling of the urban neighborhoods of San Diego, North Park is a hodgepodge. Cozy, tidy pockets of Craftsman homes on the north edge of Balboa Park (hence the name), dense apartments, and the pre-interstate retail stretches of University Ave and El Cajon Blvd. define North Park. In the late 1800′s, the James Hartley family bought 40 acres northeast of Balboa Park for growing lemons. Development in San Diego spread to the Hartley property, which became Hartley’s North Park. In 1911, son Jack Hartley developed the business district at 30th and University Ave., which is still the heart of North Park. North Park is a diverse neighborhood of single family homes, apartment complexes, businesses, and arts. It has a business district that is almost a downtown unto itself – unusual for a neighborhood. Besides its diversity, North Park is special for the architecture that dominates the neighborhood. North Park is synonymous with the Craftsman cottages and bungalows that reflect California’s era of suburban development.
It was a classic bout. Urban decay verses the blight of cookie-cutter cultural hegemony. Unfortunately for the revolutionaries and artists “progress” won. Because culture transcends individual lives, we are unaccustomed to thinking that the society in which we live could ever have an end point or, if it did, that we might find ourselves in its final days. I suspect that those who lived in the cultures that preceded our own, were thoroughly convinced that their social structures, practices, and culture would endure forever. But history teaches us otherwise. Just as children must eventually confront the mortality of their parents – and, in the process, theirs as well – there is nothing remarkable in the pattern of cultures, like human beings, being born, growing old, and dying.
Because the principle of entropy maintains its constant influence in the world, all living systems must generate new energy (or “negative entropy”) if they are to resist – at least temporarily – their collapse into their ultimate fate. We eat, in other words, not because someone has prepared an attractive meal for us, but because our continuing failure to do so will soon bring about our death.
The health of any system, be it an individual or a society, depends upon the production of those values necessary for that system’s survival. If we misfocus our attention, we may erroneously conclude that our material well-being is dependent upon the creation of the “things” that we consume in our efforts to sustain ourselves. In so doing, we tend to ignore the underlying conditions that make the production of such values possible. We come to value, and depend upon, the goose that lays the golden egg, rather than upon the processes by which creative individuals might produce more geese, or more efficient means of generating gold.
In such ways do we create institutions (systems that have become their own reasons for being, rather than means for producing life-sustaining values). The problem with all of this is that the institutionalization of the systems that produce the values upon which a culture depends, ultimately bring about the destruction of that culture. A culture begins to break down when there is a loss of creative power in the souls of creative individuals, and, in time, the differentiation and diversity that characterized a dynamic culture, is replaced by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity. The emergence of a universal state, and increased militarism, represent later stages in the disintegration of a culture.
A creative culture, in other words, is dynamic, not stable; adaptive to change, not seeking equilibrium. It is characterized not by those who seek to preserve what they have, but by those who seek to produce what their minds tell them they can have. Individual liberty abounds in such a society, as men and women advance new ideas, new technologies, and new practices. This was the culture of North Park. This is the place stamped into consistency, pressed into acceptability, conscripted into mainstream slavery. Eat this, do that, go here, buy these… Fuck you!
The death of North Park signals deeper problems than just the closure of a couple dive bars. The death of North Park is an obscene gesture predicting the fate of all America. The death of North Park is a precursor to the death of America. A nation that is bulldozing its freedom and creativity in exchange for uniformity and “progress”. North Park was murdered not because the culture failed but because of money and power. It succeeded so much that it appeared on the corporate radar. The sad fact is that North Park was crushed purely in the ongoing power struggle between citizens and their maleficent corporate benefactors. Fuck you “progress” – you are one popular metanarrative that I will not ascribe to. At least not with the definition that the oblivious consumer zeitgeist seems to award you.
And so we all languish under this newfangled oppression. The oppression of a HD widescreen TV’s. The oppression of expensive drinks and floors that your feet don’t stick to. The oppression of everyone trying to make a scene or a fashion statement or both. The oppression of streets that hookers will no longer strut. Bars with lines to get into them. Bartenders with no personality that have no idea who the fuck you are and don’t care. Cover charges. Boring bands. Sushi. Starbucks. Restaurants with bizarre menu items and dubious tipping practices simply to say that they have bizarre menu items and dubious tipping practices (check out Hipsters of the World, Unite!). Liberal Democrats who can’t wait to tell you all about it whether you are speaking with them or not. Assholes telling you about their brand new five hundred dollar shirt that looks just like they got it from a thrift store. A condo complex where a bowling alley used to be. A yogurt store where a bondage sex shop once reigned. Zombies where freedom loving people once walked.
In a city full of mindless perpetual college students, jocks, scenesters, hippies, hipsters, trixies and military boys that clutter places like Downtown and Pacific Beach, North Park was an eclectic mix of different people from all aspects of life. This was the arts, fashion and music hub of San Diego. It had a wide array of amazing restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. North Parkers used to be relaxed, unpretentious, friendly, and fun. Now I can’t seem to walk across a bar without smashing somebody’s face. Yeah, the place used to be a bit dodgy but that was the fun of it.
Cultures die out for the same reason organisms do: their failure to maintain a sufficient resiliency that will permit them to overcome entropy. They then linger on stagnant pools left by once life-giving streams. The death of North Park has turned a life-giving stream into a stagnant pool. You say you appreciate art but you try to clone and destroy Ray @ Night. You want things to look dirty but without the dirt!? You want to make a buck while stealing something’s identity!? You want to go to North Park but without all the “North Park”!? This is not Disneyland and was never supposed to be. This ain’t some G rated ride motherfuckers, the pirates are real! Take all your money, take all your pretentiousness, and take all your “progress” and go fuck yourselves!
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