DOMINIQUE

Dominique Fong is a senior majoring in print journalism and political science, with a minor in entrepreneurship, at the University of Southern California. The only sweets she’ll eat are tiramisu, Nutella crepes and lemon sorbet. In her spare time, she likes sitting on rooftops with a Stella in one hand, kicking mean boys in the shins during soccer games and having her tummy rubbed. Visit her blog here.

I admit it. I’m an elitist: a classical music aficionado, a Louvre lover, a tortured intellectual obsessed with highbrow culture and sexy existentialist philosophy. My ideal lover would be a cross between my two favorite badasses, Jean-Paul Sartre and Harrison Ford. How can you blame me? I’m part French.

Last week my arts reporting teacher, Sasha Anawalt, former dance critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, challenged our class to break out of our familiar tastes in art and entertainment. We were encouraged to experience a genre we had never explored or had always disliked for some reason. Being a snob, I thought I should do something totally lowbrow, amateur and utterly uncomfortable.

So for this assignment, I turned in the opposite direction of The Getty and drove east to Skid Row. This was only my second visit to the neighborhood. I came back because I wanted to stop pitying homeless people. I wanted to stop seeing them embodied as the annoying man who begs for money outside of Bank of America. I wanted to understand their life stories and empathize with their joy and their pain.

This past Saturday, the Los Angeles Poverty Department and the United Coalition East Prevention Project organized an early Easter celebration at Gladys Park on 6th Street. I asked my friend Cisco, who looks like a club bouncer, to come with me. Not that anything would happen, but I shuddered to think of the unspeakables that dirty men in an area rank with violence, prostitution and drugs would do to an unprotected young Asian woman. I’m not scared of many things, even dying, but I wanted to be secure, just in case.

The festivities were a collage of jarring imagery – harmony mixed with desperation, joy juxtaposed with suffering. One scene in particular caught my eye and I couldn’t help but do the one thing I tried to resist. I stared at a woman who looked like a drugged out Shirley Temple walk along the outskirts of the fenced park and rest her head on the legs of her friend. She had a bright red mark on the left side of her face. Questions zipped through my mind. Did someone beat her? Or was she so mentally unstable that she hurt herself? Why did she look like a child who had never grown up? I really didn’t want to, and I felt disgusted at myself immediately afterward, but I pitied her.

I was used to audiences filing into striking concert halls, sitting in evenly spaced cushioned seats and focusing their undivided attention to the show. Viewers were not allowed to talk, and profuse coughs drew glances of annoyance. The enforced silence mystified the musicians onstage, a scene removed from daily life. The conductor and orchestra were a spectacle of talent that I paid high ticket prices to watch.

Skid Row was a different kind of spectacle. The fluid spontaneity of jazz music reflected the disorder of homelessness. Jazz is not bound by the lines on centuries-old sheet music created by a famous European composer. The genre encourages the freedom to play according to your sense of timing, tempo and melody. If the notes keep coming, then keep playing. “You never run out [of keys] or anything,” said Gary Brown, who was homeless for nearly 10 years but now lives several blocks away from Skid Row.

As his music flowed like a lullaby over the bodies sleeping on the ground, I identified with him. Even if he wasn’t trained classically, even if he wasn’t wearing a suit and looked a little scruffy, I understood his passion for music. It reminded me of how long I hadn’t practiced piano and missed touching the white keys. When words can’t describe the despair of a place like Skid Row, the simple notes of a saxophone can say it all. In realizing the power of music to soothe brokenness and bring peace even for just a day, I knew that I had no right to judge. I might never be able to feel the extent of what a homeless person feels, but I found hope in the happiness of the jazz musicians. They might never play at Walt Disney Concert Hall, but through music, they had the freedom to be free, lost in the beauty of the melodies they created. Witnessing the beauty of music in Skid Row broke down the barriers I had around “highbrow” culture.