Donjuanna in Soho
"Your name?", said the young LAPD officer, taking my witness statement. We were standing in a McDonald's on Pico Blvd, almost ten years ago surrounded by a dozen or so other officers. The details of how I and they came to be there are not important right now. "Juan-Luis," I replied. He glanced at me for a second, betraying a moment of confusion. The next section of his form was marked 'Ethnicity'. He hovered over a couple of options and ticked 'Hispanic', which is technically correct, although not really
right.
One of my favourite travel writers, Pico Iyer, wrote a book
'The Global Soul', in which he tried to define and explore that increasing state of in-between (countries, places, cultures, languanges, identities) that many of us find ourselves in nowadays. And not simply avid travellers or global businesspeople, but people like myself, born of parents from two very different cultures and raised in a third in which I never became a citizen, currently living in one of those three, yet torn between them, unable to settle in any particular place, regardless of where I am currently choosing to define as
home.
Growing up in a multicultural home, bi-lingual, with parents whose accents don't match your own, you dread the question "where are you from?", a question that depending on the context and company, can have any one of several answers. Like one's family, you can't normally choose your native home and culture. Yet that was the question I was always asking myself as a child -
where do I choose to come from? Actually, this question wasn't so much something I would ask as be asked by others, "Which do you prefer - Spain or England?". I remember a history teacher, covering the two World Wars, asking if we'd be willing to fight for our country. I don't remember if I raised my hand, but I remember thinking -
which country is he referring to? The irony that I could be drafted to fight in two separate countries that as a child I'd never actually lived in and had only partial attachment to, was not lost on me. The scene in Woody Allen's
Love and Death, when he is drafted into the Russian army and is being trained by a loud African-American seargent, ("You
LOVE your country don't you boy?". "Yes, sir". "You wanna
DIE for your country, don't you boy?". "Well, umm, let's not take things too far"), is a comic masterpiece that comes to mind when I imagine being trained in some foreign army.
It is not without its benefits, of course. Being able to pick up or renounce (at least, not admit to) a particular part of ones heritage as it suits the circumstances has been hugely advantageous to me. Growing up bi-lingual and tri-cultural you cannot help but be inculcated with the notion that there is not only one way of viewing the world, one way to view any situation or person. You are condemned to a life of being a permanent moderate, unable to swallow any absolutist position. This extends to the relativity of cultural norms and values, such as the fact that in the Spanish countryside it is perfectly acceptable, encouraged even, to pee outside in the dry
arroyo rather than in the toilet, whereas the same doesn't hold true in English suburbia. Don't ask me how I know this.
The downside is of course that no one will accept you wholly as one of them. My name means I will never be an Englishman. The way I stumble over Spanish and my looks mean I cannot be Castillian. And American, as John Cleese says in his memorable cameo in the western film
Silverado in perfectly accented English, "as you might have guessed, I'm not from these parts".
When I started piano lessons at the tender age of six, the music teacher wrote 'Duane' at the top of each sheet of music we would play. For weeks this continued, my curiosity burning to know what this meant. Was it a bit of musical direction I was supposed to follow, along with the
allegros and
molto andantes? Finally, unable to hold it in, since he would write it and never refer to it again, I blurted out "what does that mean?" He looked at me, confused. "That's your name."
California is a place where people can re-make themselves in some other image unconstrained by past expectations, and they can pronounce
Juan. The cliche of travelling far from home to find yourself is almost true in California, although it is more of a
making than a
finding. When I moved here, people would of course ask me where I was from, but instead of judgement, more often than not, there was acceptance, and it was rarely spoken of again.
It's been ten years since I left the UK. I never thought I would have been away this long, in fact I made at least one attempt to move back, before Industrial Light and Magic waved the
Star Wars carrot in front of me and enticed me back. I certainly never thought I would consider myself settled here. I've tried, in various ways, to live trans-atlantically, visiting as often as I could, taking extended breaks in Europe, etc. Yet, I have had to give up on so much living here, so many moments in my family's daily life that have passed me by, it's been a source of some discontent for me through the years.
When I quit ILM in June, I had definitely reached a crossroads. I wanted to dedicate myself for a time to my photography and nothing else, to start to build for a future free of the movie industry. So I understood the confusion for some people when within what seemed like a short period of time, I was working again for Lucasfilm. How was that getting me closer to my goal? Truth is - it wasn't, but it has been a wonderful opportunity and they afforded me the chance to earn money
and to continue working on my photographs (which I still hope to exhibit early in 2007).
I wondered then, as I do now, how people would react if they knew that in addition to all this, that I was actively seeking out work in the UK for 2007? If the US visual effects industry works hard, by all accounts the industry in London works even harder for less money and no overtime, in a place more expensive than either Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York. Your family is there, but so what, you'll be working so hard you'll never see them, and continue to be chained to a career you are trying to grow out of, or at least slowly transform? So I have competing demands and goals that aren't all in sync, sue me. Call me ambivalent, or ambiguous (the down side of
moderate, perhaps?).
What this very long preamble is leading to is what you might have already anticipated - Donna and I are moving to London in early 2007 to work and live. How long? Unknown, a few months to begin with and then we'll see. We'll be working at one of the main Soho visual effects facilities -
Double Negative.
The London effects industry has matured incredibly in the time that I've been away. That's not the only thing that has happened in the UK in the last ten years; chavs, a Blair government, to name but two. To say nothing of the last ten years in the USA, seeing from the inside the actions of a government that will affect the world for decades to come. It will be a homecoming, but an adventure into something unknown too, and something I am very happy that Donna and I will be experiencing together.
"The pursuit of happiness" is written into the United States Declaration of Independence, one of the many astonishing aspects of this somewhat unfairly maligned country. This sidesteps the fact that happiness isn't something that can be pursued, bought or traded, something that Pico Iyer believes dooms its people to life of disappointment, compared to a country founded partly on Budhhist values of daily struggle and suffering, such as Japan, where he now resides. That the founders of the USA would even try to tackle and codify such a right, however, seems wonderful to me. That pursuit is taking us over to the UK, and then we'll see.
I've been paying more attention to the podcasts I listen to from the BBC, seeing what is going on now in London that awaits us when we get there. I am particularly excited to see
Patrick Marber's new play that just opened, the appropriately titled, 'Don Juan in Soho'.
More recently I was again surrounded by police officers taking a witness statement (don't ask, I really don't look for these things), this time across the San Francisco Bay in Emeryville. The tall African-American police officer was taking down my details. He asked me where I was from. "Spain", I said. His eyes lit up. "I love Spain," he said, his professional demeanour gone, replaced with wide-eyed enthusiasm. "Years ago I was part of the pro-basketball team in Spain. We played all over Europe. Spain, France, England, Sweden, Japan, everwhere. If I could live anywhere I'd move to Europe. The south of France actually. Yeah, I'd love that."
It wasn't what I was expecting to hear from an officer of the Emeryville PD, but I understood it. After we've pursued happiness, perhaps D and I will settle in the south of France, and maybe we'll recognise our neighbor. Sorry - our neighbour.
England |
Work |
Double Negative |
ILM |
Star Wars |
San Francisco |
Pico Iyer |
Global Soul |
Patrick Marber |
Don Juan In Soho |
London
