3. L.A. as a Free-Associative City
Koshikawa: Take the Hotel Hamblin in Amnesiascope, for instance. I think it's your favorite image of anarchy, the free world for the pleasure of the unconscious.
Erickson: Yes.
Koshikawa: That hotel seems similar to a place from the previous novel called "the Arboretum " where you can see so-called nefarious activities, like "a theater, TV arcade, book outlets," and "forbidden artifacts." In the Hotel Hamblin, you have a manager Abdul who is a Palestinian terrorist, and a weird radio station named "Station 3." This radio station is owned by a Moroccan religious sect who believes in an SF version of Islamic fundamentalism and plays Moroccan jajouka music all the time. How do you get this kind of image?
Erickson: Los Angeles is very to conducive to that kind of image. Los Angeles is such a pluralistic, eclectic mix of influences and cultures and sort of random associations. It's the free-associative city, if you know what I mean, free association being where you think about one thing and it just automatically conjures up the image of something else that may be totally unrelated. But the subconscious makes a link. And Los Angeles is the subconscious city. And it's very easy to imagine that kind of strange conglomeration that you are talking about. I have never actually made the parallel between "the Arboretum" and the Hotel Hamblin. I think it's really appropriate.
Koshikawa: I thought you took the key note of the Hotel Hamblin from ""the Arboretum."
Erickson: I probably did, it wasn't something I was conscious of.
Kosikawa: Maybe I was attracted to the anarchic aspect of these places.
Erickson: That kind of closed system of strange conglomerations does seem to pop up in my fiction now and then, so I've got to assume that there's a reason for it, that there is some connection.
Koshikawa: Do you have a model for this Hotel Hamblin?
Erickson: Yes. It was modeled after the apartment building that I lived in for five years, right in the center of Los Angeles.
Koshikawa: Is that the one I saw? The building with a kind of old Gothic atmosphere?
Erickson: Yes, exactly. When it was first built in the 1920s, it had an Art Deco look to it, but as time has gone by, it has gone from Art Deco to Gothic. It originally was a hotel where aspiring movie stars stayed when they first came to Los Angeles. They were looking to break into the movies, and they would stayed in that hotel. Legend has it that John Wayne stayed in that hotel. Jean Harlow stayed in that hotel.
Koshikawa: The hallways are very dark even in the daytime.
Erickson: In this country, do you know the movie "Barton Fink"? If you see the movie, which takes place in Hollywood in the 1930s, people who have seen the movie and have gone into that building that you saw are always reminded of "Barton Fink." It's very much like that.
Koshikawa: Who's Barton Fink?
Erickson: Barton Fink is the name of the main character in the film. He's a playwright from New York who has been brought into Hollywood to write for the movies, and they put him up in this old strange hotel, which always reminds people of the apartment building that you saw and I lived in. And that became the model of the Hotel Hamblin.
Koshikawa: When I went to the apartment 4 or 5 years ago, there lived a bunch of punks.
Erickson: All kinds of people lived there. There were people who had lived there for a long time, and then there were punks and there were young starlets, beautiful women who had come to break into the movies. There were always beautiful women around the building.
Koshikawa: I envy you.
Erickson: They would be there for a month or two. They would move in, they were there for a month or two, and they would be gone. And you never knew what happened to them--if they took up with some producer, had become successful, found a husband or boy friend. But there was a steady stream of beautiful women through the hotel, who would come and be there for a month and then would be gone.
Koshikawa: So, those beautiful women came from all over the United States.
Erickson: Exactly.
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4. Animal Logic and Compulsive Drive
Edited by Syuichi OTOMORI