In Minima Moralia, Los Angeles is glimpsed frequently between the lines, as it were, even if this phantom L.A. bears little relation to the city of today. It’s not so much that Adorno says things that are untrue; it’s more that he is responding to a reality ‘that reality no longer tolerates.’ As with the stuff about self-closing doors, it suits Adorno’s view of the alienating effect of capitalism to discover, in a restaurant, that ‘the waiter no longer knows the menu,’ but it’s an observation that leaves the twenty-first-century reader with only one response: Are you fucking kidding me? The defining part of the waiter’s job involves reciting the day’s specials in such extreme detail that you have to be reminded of the first items the moment he or she has finished telling you about the last. Back in the days when all waiters were assumed to be aspiring actors it was as though this recitation was part of an endless audition, with the ironic twist that some who’d brought it to a pitch of perfection would actually be typecast — stuck in the role of waiter — for the rest of their working lives (an entirely different form of alienation, one akin to that described by Brecht in the first of his ‘Hollywood Elegies’).
Minima Moralia is not a portrait of L.A., but the city and its culture are there as the black backing that enables Adorno’s ‘reflections’ to function. In a way that is entirely appropriate for the co-author of Negative Dialectics, L.A. is turned into a kind of mirror image of itself, like a photographic negative where everything light is dark, white has turned black and so on. In fact, I realize now, this would be a cool cover for a new edition of Minima Moralia: a spectral view of a boulevard, palm-fringed and frosty, with a black sun freezing through the grey sky.
It’s appropriate as well because, notwithstanding that enthusiastic early letter to his parents, in the pages of Minima Moralia the one thing L.A. never seems to be is in colour. Adorno seems oblivious to the light of L.A., to the amazing blues, the contemporary blaze of colour. We — people in our late fifties or older — tend to remember the weather of our English childhoods as being much better than it was, because back in the 1950s and 1960s people only took pictures if there was ‘enough light’ and so the memory-shaping evidence of photography suggests a permanent light-and heat-wave that has long since receded. In southern California, by contrast, it takes an effort to recall that the beach always looked as it does now, that sky and sea were the same perfect blue when Adorno was here, in the black-and-white years of the Second World War, and before that even — in the 1920s, 1890s or a hundred years B.C.
Before we started going on our driving pilgrimages we would cycle along the bike path to Santa Monica. The bike path is clearly marked, but there are always lots of people walking or not even walking, just dawdling and stopping in the middle of the path to take pictures. Even some of the cyclists have no more idea how to ride a bike than if they’d rented a donkey for the afternoon, so although it’s one of the nicest bike paths in the world it’s also slightly irritating, since you have to ring your bell constantly to avoid the herds of iPod zombies and THC drongos — some of whom don’t even register that the bell is intended as a warning, like the slim girl in unignorable denim cut-offs who, smiling through a fog of narcotic bewilderment, responded, ‘What a pretty bell!’—but since one of the attractions of California is the relative absence of aggression, it’s not in anyone’s interests to start yelling, ‘Get out of the fucking bike path, arsehole!’ even if that is the thought going round and round your head like a bicycle wheel.
On Sunday afternoons, on a small area of grass near where the original Muscle Beach was located, people gather to do a version of acrobatics. A few are doing solo somersaults and cartwheels, but most are in pairs, practising a fusion of acrobatics and yoga called ‘acro’ or ‘acro adagio.’ One person, usually a man, provides a stable but constantly changing platform for the flyer — usually a woman — and together they move through a series of more or less complex routines. Often these moves will culminate with the flyer standing, smiling and staring straight ahead, held up above the man’s head. Sometimes the flyer balances on one foot — perhaps with the other leg bent up over her back — held aloft by one thickly muscled, slightly quivering arm. I’d seen pictures of this — Charles Atlas lookalikes holding up smiling blondes in swimsuits — from the forties and fifties and had assumed that it was all about the men, that the women were trophies or symbols of what was on display: i.e., the men’s strength. Either I’d got that wrong or what is being practised nowadays is different in several ways. The woman is not just held aloft; she plays an active part in the man’s being able to fling her into the air and sustain her weight. As much as strength it’s a matter of balance and cantilevered force, of using the weight of one part of the flyer’s body — its urge to succumb to gravity — to lighten another part. And whereas from photographs it seemed that the important thing was the climactic pose, it is the fluid succession of movements and rhythm that is spellbinding. Sometimes there is no stillness, just an endless succession of unfolding movements, a constant and subtle display of physical dialectics.
I wanted to know if this was indeed a recent development, and so when one of the flyers was taking a break I asked her if, back in the fifties, when a woman’s life consisted of looking nice and cooking dinners, it was much more of a strong-man-type thing, but she had no knowledge of the history of what was happening here and seemed to think that I was suggesting that the eternal role of women was to cook and smile, even if these days they are as heavily inked as the guys. Later, at home, I did a bit of research and saw, from the famous photographs taken by Frank J. Thomas, that women had indeed been active participants back in the 1950s (in some they’re actually airborne), but in the immediate aftermath of this bungled conversation, I felt awkward about asking anyone else about the history of acro, so I just sat and watched — still feeling awkward, because it might have seemed that I was only here to gawp at flexible, tattooed chicks in Lycra.
Given the partially clothed, physical intimacy of acro, a quite careful decorum is maintained throughout. There’s a lot of Californian hugging as participants greet each other, but both parties push their bottoms outwards to make sure there is no pelvic contact. And while everything being practised cries out to be incorporated into a sequence of erotic moves in the privacy of the bedroom — or on stage at some New Age equivalent of the Raymond Revuebar — the atmosphere is so politely chaste (in a relaxed and healthy way) that to mention or even notice its implied sexual potential is to coarsen what is unfolding before your eyes.
The acro-istas are all strong and supple, though the ratio of strength to suppleness subtly varies. Some are more skilled than others, and there are a number of people who have obviously been coming here for ages, who have the air not of being in charge exactly but who, if there were an election to see who should run the show, would win by an overwhelming and happy majority even if the idea of running anything is entirely anathema to the spirit of the place, which is marked by a quite wonderful inclusiveness. Anyone can join in, at any level, and everyone helps out everyone else, contributing advice and tips (a tiny adjustment, the angle of a foot or shoulder, makes the difference between stability and collapse). Often men team up together to practise things, though it always looks as if this is more difficult than a man-woman pairing. Sometimes kids will join in, their mums or dads holding them up in the air, and you can imagine when they are fifteen or sixteen the boys will be back here, because, obviously, it’s the most fantastic way to meet girls (who will have come back too), completely different to how things were for me in Cheltenham, when trying to meet girls meant going to a disco, drinking a gallon of beer, only speaking to your mates and getting punched in the face on the walk home — often by one of these mates — for reasons that were never entirely clear, though beer obviously played a part. On our second visit to acro, one of the regulars helped a girl of about eight to stand on his shoulders and do a little twirl. She wobbled, fell; he caught her, lowered her gently to the ground and asked if she would mind if they could please try that once more. It was impossible to imagine anything more charming, but the really great thing was the way that the mum sat there, happy to let this stranger, muscled like Conan the Barbarian, assume responsibility for her daughter’s safety and happiness.