Ed Reif in The People's Republic of Santa Monica
Santa Monica · A Bicycle Field Note
The ElixirThe Epiphany Chair
A bike ride past Chess Park becomes a roll call for Santa Monica’s old radicals—and a meditation on what remains after a place changes around you.
The chair looked like a throne, the rabbit looked like a revelation, and the bicycle supplied the philosophy.
“What am I on? My bike.”
Field Note 01 · Your Move
All Good People
I biked past Chess Park, where—before September 11—my buddy Bicycle Pete, PBUH, who lived in his van, held court alongside the Old Radicals.
There was “Swiss” Pierre, a John Demjanjuk look-alike and kindly grandfather with that Nazi past, sitting all day beneath his rainbow umbrella and giving chess “lessons” for a dollar a game. There was Irwin, the hired gun for the RAND Corporation, busy living happily ever after.
And there was Mark Rosenberg, Grandmaster of the Caro-Kann Defense—1. e4 c6—a man with no visible means of support and the self-proclaimed King of Chess Park. A Barney Fife public-safety officer in a straw hat and bright Hawaiian shirts repeatedly ticketed “The Urinator,” one of the houseless regulars, for trespassing and publicly peeing in the park.
Field Note 02 · The People’s Republic
Status, Quo, and the Old Radicals
Mark even added value to the design of Chess Park. Then there was Isaac, the Persian architect and “Lord of the Rings.” I took a victory lap for the Shah of L.A.
All of us—as shallow and pedantic as we may have been—used to pontificate about renaming Santa Monica Ho Chi Minh City. We complained and kibitzed about the conservatives, the landlords, the developers, and the busy people.
Dave, lifeguard and Pope of Greenwich Village, wore SP50 zinc-oxide sunscreen on his recently basal-cell-scraped nose and settled on The People’s Republic of Santa Monica. The city had an all-you-can-eat smörgåsbord of Big Sur, New York SoHo, and Beverly Hills-by-the-sea: Green Party politics and New Age Woodstock-generation ethos, all wrapped into one.
The Elixir · What the Ride Brought Back
More Status. More Quo.
There is a little more status and a lot more quo these days—and the Old Radicals are nowhere to be seen.
Three days ago, actor Donald Sutherland hit a bicyclist. I wonder if it was Pete?
The city changed. The chessboards remained. The bicycle made the old cast visible again. That is the trick of the Epiphany Chair: it does not pull a rabbit from a hat so much as pull a vanished Santa Monica back into view.
Moving Image · Original Film