Last weekend I had the opportunity to stay at a beachfront hotel in Venice Beach. Despite living around the area most of my life, this was my first visit to the “boardwalk” since the early 1980s. NOTHING HAS CHANGED! The first thing you notice is all of the competing music from live performers and boomboxes (remember those?). All of a vintage no older than 1975 nor more recent than 1985. Then the smells; incense and surf wax and corn dogs and weed. And finally the people. The 50% composed of tourists dress a little differently, but the balance made up of the locals, the posers, the destitute, and the hustlers look and behave just as I remember 40 years ago. Oiled down body builders, copper-toned roller skaters, struggling artists and buskers, GoGo’s wannabes, thong models, dreadlocked stoners, and the entertainingly deranged. They’re all a little older now, but they are still dressing and behaving as they did in 1982. I’m not complaining. It was all very amusing and nostalgic, but also befuddling. How does that kind of very specific zeitgeist survive so long?
Any other places like this where the high energy is used for anything BUT moving into the future?
Well, Venice Beach (or at least some portion of it) may have changed since the late 1950s - early 1960s.
When I was a wee lad, we had kinfolk (my father’s sister and her family) who lived in Venice just a half-block from the beach. We went there frequently. I haven’t been back there since mid-1960s or so. Everything I’ve read about the place, or seen in pictures, including your descriptions above, is totally unrecognizable from what I remember. It was just a nice, quiet beach.
There are other low energy places that I think would be more likely to not move into the future.
The entire San Francisco Bay Area has been growing and booming since Christopher Columbus landed there. When I first came to the area in 1969, there were vast areas of open space that are fully developed now, and much more in the process.
And yet, there is at least one little community, not far from some high-growth areas, that seems little different from the way it was at least as far back as then. It looks like one of those one-saloon towns you see in all the old Western TV shows. I am thinking, of course, of Byron, CA, right in the vicinity of burgeoning Brentwood, Discovery Bay, and on one of the roads to Tracy, that still resembles a little one-stagecoach community. No real evidence of any energy there.
Yeah. Except for maybe Muscle Beach, I’m not sure Venice Beach had a character that was significantly distinct from other beach towns until the mid-seventies.
Yep, it sounds just like my experience when I visited Venice Beach in 1985. I was 21. I flew out with my mom, Grandma and my 2 younger sisters to spend Christmas with my uncle, who lived in Redondo Beach at the time. When the family decided to go to Seaworld one day, I opted to take a pilgrimage to Venice Beach by myself, the place where Jim Morrison used to hang out before he got famous. Would have been like a 20 minute drive by car, but my uncle didn’t want to loan me his spare vehicle, so I ended up taking like 3 bus connections. It took me TWO HOURS ONE WAY to get there by bus.
It was just like the OP described. Girls in roller skates and bikinis attempting to dance in unison. Body builder dudes. Street performers doing their thing. Lots and lots of stoner-looking types. I overheard a girl walking with two guys saying “i used to be more angry, but I’m much more self-actualized these days”. It was almost too ‘central casting’ in terms of a California vibe, with kind of a shabbiness underlying it all.
I thought it would be cool to find a joint to smoke while I was there (when in Rome, amirite?), so I went up to one of the many stoner-looking dudes I saw and asked him if he had any pot or knew where I could get some. He said, in the most stereotypical stoner voice ever, “I’m not really into organics anymore, man”. I had no idea what that meant, took it as a blowoff, so just walked away. I quickly gave up my search as it dawned on me how badly I stuck out in that crowd-- I had just gotten a haircut and my hair was very short. I think I had on a pair of mirrored sunglasses, which I thought was cool at the time, but I probably looked like a badly disguised undercover cop. Or just a general midwestern dork, which is what I was.