Free California

Mop Men: California's Crime Scene Cleaners

California “True Crime” is one worn out genre. From the quick dry pulp of the Peterson Case to a hardcore social of analysis of the Manson Family, there seems to be no end to our insatiable desire for proof of California’s deep neurosis. Rare is the book that can transcend the clutter and actually say something new about well-trodden footpath of California Drama. Alan Emmins’ Mop Men: California's Crime Scene Cleaners is that rare book.

Mop Men is a look inside a Bay Area crime scene clean-up crew over a 30-day period in 2003. Emmins, a Brit who now lives in Denmark, catalogs the daily trials of himself and the crew as they scrub the guts and gore left over from suicides, murders, meth-labs and all the devilish ephemera of modern urban/suburban life. During the course of the book, we bare witness as Emmins slowly comes to grips with the job and the culture that surrounds him.

What separates Mop Men, an important theme largely ignored by U.K. reviewers, is the contrast between the action (cleaning up gruesome death) and the portrayal of the contradictions inherent in living in the Golden State. Early on, we follow Alan as he drives from Los Angeles to the Bay Area. Along the way makes a poignant stop in Santa Cruz, CA. Expecting the typical beach town, our mythical place, he instead finds a boarded-up melancholy boardwalk and lower-class ghetto. That night, after checking into a flea bag beach motel, he heads out for a beer but ends up getting smashed with a bunch of raucous Mexicans. After agreeing to let his new cholo friends drive him back to the motel he is gripped with the fear that these crazy Mexicans are going kill him. The fear of course is unfounded; they are after all just a bunch of jovial drinking buddies, but the paranoia is real and what seems like an innocuous event that could have been left out takes on greater meaning as things move forward.

False drama with the Mexicans sets the scene for real drama to come as Emmins heads north to the supposed tranquil confines of white-bread Walnut Creek, CA. It is here, in one of America’s most exclusive suburbs, that death reveals himself. We meet, the boss, cleaner of Death, the hard charging Alan Smither, who’s personality, and ridiculous driving style, will be familiar to California readers. At last the action (cleaning up after the dead) begins.

Slowly, we begin to understand that this book is not really True Crime after all and that the gruesome scenes of clean-up serve a larger purpose. Emmins has arrived in California at the very moment Arnold Swartzenhegger began teasing the public that he plans to run in the re-call election. The author wisely juxtaposes grizzly tales of crime scene clean-up with bits of news from the re-call, the very things Emmins is consuming. These vignettes, not unlike the "Newsreels" in John Dos Passos’ U.S.A Trilogy, serve to fix the story and accelerate the drama. The tension between real life and death and the outlandish fantasy world of California commerce and politics is disturbing to say the least. Eventually, both events begin to merge and overtake the author (and frankly the reader). Whacked out contrasts drive the plot as lights switch on, we leave the “phony” Walnut Creek and enter the “real” San Francisco next store, tweaked-out states of being flow, Mary Carey jokes from the Daily Show on TV one minute, then - boom - Emmins is chipping bone fragments from the wall of Middle Class strip home, the next.

With Mop Men, Emmins has captured an essential truth about being Californian few writers have managed to carry off, Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear came to mind as we read the book. We know these Mop Men exists everywhere but somehow finding and exploring them in the hyper-glossy and hyper-gross world of Modern California makes the whole experience more illuminating. To paraphrase the author:

Think transcending.
Think Million Dollar homes on faults.
Think death from above.

Free California strongly recommends Mop Men.

The Story of California Baseball

It has really been sports week here at Free California but this one was too good not to post.

Heyday Books just released a great book, The Golden Game: The Story of California Baseball, documenting the role California played in the growth of baseball.

In it, author Kevin Nelson, details highs and lows of the game on the West Coast. The books is littered with interesting facts and stories about Golden State baseball such as the tail of Alexander Cartwright, who wrote the first rules of baseball in New York and shortly thereafter headed West to seek his fortune in the Gold Rush. Cartwright, like many of time, ended up penniless and returned to the east but the game stayed and became a major pass time among gold-seeking 49ers.

But what really separates the books is its detailed summary of how California influenced the rise and culture of the game. The book gives us both the obvious, like the fact that, growing up in Los Angeles, Jackie Robinson was able to play integrated games from childhood and better prepared for the torments he would face as the first black man in the majors, and the not so obvious, like the story of San Francisco's Lefty O'Doul who was instumental in bringing baseball to Japan, a sport long popular among Japanese-Californians. And finally, we read of all the great California players who have revolutionized the game, from San Francisco’s Joe DMaggio to Dennis Eckersly from Oakland, there are now 32 Californians in the Hall-of-Fame.

This is a good book for baseball fans and California history buffs alike.

“Where I Was From"…before I moved to the Upper East Side

Much has been written about Joan Didion’s legacy as the modern writer on California. Some have gone so far as call her the ‘conscience’ of the state or, more pejoratively, an interpreter of California for America’s intelligentsia (e.g. snooty New York). After publishing remarkable books on the state such as River Run, The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, in Where I Was From, Didion fully injects herself into the narrative with lukewarm results.

The book traces her family’s life in the state, which approximately parallels the states Anglo-history, and then analyzes the states broader social and cultural trends along the way. Didion deftly twists the big themes of California, Frontier society, the influx of money following the completion of the transcontinental rail road, and big Agriculture, water and land rights, etc. into a nice neat package for her smart readers to chew on.

The book is at its best when she describes personal or family stories relating to different aspects of California culture. She writes with real empathy on the problems inherent in a society cut off from leveling forces of history, family and society and the greed and avarice which often result when “going it alone”. We read the big tales of California, Land owners, like Henry Miller, who could drive his cattle form the Oregon board to Mexico without leaving his land, of individuals so mortgaged and turned out by life that living itself is proving impossible and of a society so dependent culturally and financially on government that one is left to wonder how we continue to survive here.

And though Joan probably though this was a great triumph, she is wrong. The alert for me came when Didion is describing the false reality of Sacremento’s Disney-like “Old West” downtown. As she walks through ‘Sacto’ with her daughter Quintana, she describes the fact that only her daughter is “real” in the scene in front of her. Everything else about California is not. California's a fake world, my how original? Did she really need 215 pages to tell us something nearly every writer commenting on the Golden State has written since the white man put pen to paper? I mean seriously even the name California is base on a fantasy. Of course, in the eyes of the New Yorker she has become this is to be expected. But for the rest of us, to Californians today, the people carving out a life here our troubles are all too real. And yet, we “go it alone” and progress without the Didion’s, thank you very much.

Portraying California as calcified and dying is false. For example, Latinos, among our most energetic citizens, are not even mentioned. She goes to great lengths to show us that “the valley” is a dying financially, another lie. Once you finish the book you get the sneaking suspicion that Didion is just bitter the California of her childhood dreams is gone. She has no right to drag a whole state into her own feelings of doubt and self-remorse.

Joan Didion, who’s character was shaped by a California that no longer exists (and was only available to the lucky few in the 1950’s, anyway), does not seems to understand that the true greatness of the state is it’s everlasting ability to attract or create mavericks and free spirits who tap into our pool of mania and then make it survivable. This spirit of re-generation is absent from Didion’s book and that is a crying shame.

Read:

Didion, Joan. Where I was From. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 2003.

Just consider yourself warned.

Huxley's Right Again!

Click on this link

www.customflix.com/Store/ShowTtl.jsp?id=204885

Then click on the face on the right hand side of the page to view the clip.

The person talking is Aldous Huxley the author of a Brave New World speaking from his home in the Hollywood Hills in 1949. As you listen to him, think of Carl Rove sitting in the White House. This clip is truly chilling.