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Pond Scum: Sour Lemons and Bitter Macaroons
(Finbow watches the Election in L.A.)

By Steve Finbow

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Hotel Room, Burbank, California, 6 a.m., 1st November, 2004

Last time I was in California, I was on a driving holiday. I can’t drive. My girlfriend of the time drove; my job was to change the music. Highways are pretty boring, so I invented a game to pass the time. I called it “Sorry, sir, but we’d like you to identify the body.” On the road between Barstow and Los Angeles, it appeared that, finally, the animal kingdom was losing its battle with the automobile. Road kill all over the place. What seemed an easy problem to solve was made considerably more difficult by the desert sun and the effects of heat, body gases, and flattening. What were these creatures? Black, bloated, and oozing, what could have been armadillos, coyotes, and possums looked like putrefacting diplodocus, stegosaurus, and triceratops.

Art by Nicholas Allanach

Dennis Johnson wrote, “Our only method for escaping the future is to move into it and claim it as present.” The hell it is. Or that’s how it seems here, now, in L.A., the day after Halloween, where the present seems more like the past than a newly claimed future. Hollywood is a lot less skuzzy than last time I was here. Its renovation and renewal is an attempt to mothball a past in empathy with the fossilization of identity and morality before 9/11. Where is the Dream Factory? The Hollywood Walk of Fame is a succession of schlock and gore museums. The Dream Factory has moved to Washington D.C. America is forsaking a future for a fictitious Golden Age when democracy and human rights were the leading players. Today, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not of politics.

So, politics is the new Hollywood. It may as well have been Bush/Willis or Kerry/Affleck on the ticket. The campaigns involve plots and characters; the road to the White House is a storyboarded narrative. Kerry and Bush are the stars of the biggest blockbuster this side of Titanic. The nominees are metonyms for the skewed reality that is America – the population vote for an individual. Instead of policy, planning, and proposals, we have personality, performance, and plots.

A Bush aide was quoted on the missing Iraqi munitions, “There was no intention on anybody’s part to try to represent anything that wasn’t true.” Say what? The key word here is “represent.” Films and novels represent the truth. It is as if reality were still in pre-production. Philip Roth has written that “[i]n the past… the facts have been notebook jottings. My way of springing into fiction. For me, as for most novelists, every imaginative event begins down there with facts.”

Novelists/filmmakers/artists begin with facts/truth/reality and transform them into novels/films/art. Politics begins with fiction and attempts to make it into fact. On my walk along Hollywood Boulevard, attempting to identify the so-called “stars,” I saw the names of Big Bird and Woody Woodpecker. Hey, psst -- THEY AIN’T REAL, GUYS. And the more I see of Bush and Kerry, the less real they become; they resemble cartoons of political bare necessity. As I close this part of the column, it is 10 a.m., and there is no separating Yankenstein’s Monster and Chimpmanzee.

Dresden Rooms, Los Feliz Vilage, Los Angeles, 1 p.m., 1st November, 2004.

Dressed in a royal blue with paler blue and random red polka-dot Paul Smith shirt, anti-fit Levis, black and yellow Munich 1972 Puma trainers, and his Philippe Starck glasses perched on the split cartilage of his broken nose, Finbow is lunching on a Ruebens with coleslaw and a Heineken. To offset the shadows to his left, the air shimmers and dressed in a gossamer gown, holding a crystal champagne flute filled to the brim, Joan Didion appears to the right.

Finbow: How’s it going, Joanie?
Didion: Not bad, Steve-o, not bad. You know, the political process does not reflect but increasingly proceeds from a series of fables about American experience.
Finbow: Ain’t that the truth, doll? What do you think about the theory that politics is the new Hollywood?
Didion: Traveling campaigns are sets moved at considerable expense from location to location. They talk about “story,” about how it will “play,” about camera angles. There are directors, script supervisors, and grips.
Finbow: You said it, babe. Have you read Pond Scum?
Didion: (drinks her champagne down in one long sinuous gulp) You kidding me, dude? The democracy we speak of spreading throughout the world is now in our own country only an ideality.
Finbow: Can I get you another, darling?
Didion: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Finbow rubs his eyes. The sunlight from the doorway seems to expand into the barroom gloom and engulfs Joan Didion; her body begins to quiver and is surrounded by a peacock/petrol aura, it blinks and is gone. Finbow reaches out and touches space. He turns to the other patrons.

Finbow: Do you mind if I ask whom you will vote for?
Female Bartender: Kerry.
Middle-aged Woman: Kerry.
Bus Boy: Kerry.
Russian Guy: Kerry.
Hispanic Guy: Kerry.

Finbow looks up at the TV screen. One poll is showing Kerry ahead 50-46 in Ohio. There is talk of voter intimidation, vote rigging, and vote fraud.

Finbow: (rubbing his eyes) Where am I?

Hank’s Bar, Downtown Los Angeles, 1 p.m., 2nd November, 2004.

One sign reads “God Bless America,” the other “You are beautiful.” In a bowl opposite Finbow float two goldfish. Finbow’s struggling to make a connection between the signs and the fish, and trying to read Stephen Elliott’s Looking Forward To It before the day is out. Finbow smiles knowingly at the line “politics is Hollywood for ugly people.” Have Kerry and Bush not heard of The Swan? On Finbow’s left a man is trying to explain the use of the comma to the Chinese bartender. On his left, two guys, one in a suit and the other who looks like Wavy Gravy, are betting on the outcome of the election. Finbow turns on his stool and addresses the room. “Do you mind if I ask who you are voting for?”

Chinese Bartender: Kerry.
Comma Explainer: Kerry.
Man in Suit: Kerry.
Wavy Gravy: Kerry.

Finbow sips his MGD. The goldfish, bobbing in the murky water, stare at him. Finbow stares back.

Goldfish: Bush. Bush. Bush.

Hotel Room, 6 a.m., November 3rd 2004.

I don’t know how to finish this. I had an ending but it was based on Kerry winning. It looks like those were prescient goldfish. So, here goes, four endings for the four more years.

Ruh-ruh-ruh-ow! V-r-r-ro-o-o-om! Vrm! Pfft! Pfft. Pfft………….

I give you the President of the United States of America: George W Bush!
(Disclaimer – may cause fear, poverty, war, isolationism, and in some
circumstances Armageddon.)

It came to me as I was walking along the Venice seafront that I can identify the rotting road kill – it was the bloated remains of a donkey, it was the bloated corpse of an elephant.

As you read this, I will probably be flying over Greenland. As I left LAX, I looked down on the lights of L.A. twinkling beneath me. The city spread out like a luminescent cobweb. As the plane climbed and then banked, I saw the lights blinking out one by one, the city becoming the color of the surrounding night until there was just one light remaining on the horizon, and then that too sputtered and was gone, and the country was dark, dark, dark.

Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.

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Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right).  He can be contacted here.