A shabby, showy, boggling spectacle of a place, conceived as a tribute to its namesake
took a tour of Venice – the LA suburb, not the Serenissima. It’s a poetic paean to an outpost of defiant weirdness; a countercultural enclave in a sclerotically gentrified city.
The half-mile of human-made beach was peaceful at dawn, peopled by early joggers, roller-skaters and falafel stall owners getting on with early prep, wrote, who had loved the place since 1946, ‘When blind instinct led me, a just-discharged GI, to its shabby waterfront to bake the army blues out of my bones.’ But by mid-morning, ‘Venice is a medieval fair.
In the 1950s, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs made it a ‘beatnik hangout’ and by the 1980s its subversive side was so beloved, attempts at gentrification had provoked two firebombings and the destruction of a canalside condo. There’s a sense of Venice being a precious haven, a time warp, a place where anything goes. ‘Venice will give you a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh chance,’ one writer Sigal spoke to said. ‘There’s room to fail here.
All that contributed to the shabby, showy, boggling spectacle of the place, beautifully captured in Paul Fusco’s sun-soaked pictures. Venice was, as one of the older Jewish ladies who regularly congregated to observe the carnival from a bench declared, ‘As good as the movies.’
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