The Beach: As One Man Pictures It
With the inexhaustible curiosity of a sociologist, Keith Robinson has trained his microscope-like eye on a slice of life teeming with cultural bacteria.
He has devoted himself to unraveling the mores of a place that most Southern California residents associate only with volleyball and surfing.
He has plunged his needle of analysis into the suntan-oiled flesh of Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach, communities whose oceanside sections are known to the locals as simply “The Beach.”
In doing so, Robinson has dissected patterns of Beach life that for generations had been taken for granted, like the three stages of Beach relaxation and the four basic Beach food groups (pizza, drugs and chemicals, munchies and leftovers).
He has drafted a detailed table of the Beach’s social hierarchy: The top rung is occupied by your real estate agent, anyone with a perfect tan and anyone with big bucks and no job. The bottom layers are occupied by anyone who has to rent, anyone who has to work and your parents.
He has pondered the painful consequences of love at the Beach, asking tough questions like: Good volleyball teams are hard to come by--could you still be partners with your ex-lover?
Robinson has published this research in the appropriately scholarly medium: the cartoon.
Each week for more than a year, he has crammed his drawings and detailed handwritten essays into a 7-by-6-inch space in the Easy Reader, a South Bay weekly newspaper that appreciates the offbeat.
Robinson is a compulsive social scientist. It wasn’t enough for him to simply discover separate stages of Beach relaxation. He painstakingly examined them--first, the purge stage, in which the mind rids itself of “all extraneous matters--job, school, responsibilities.” Then the tune stage, a state of heightened awareness in which the argument of that couple from Hawthorne can be heard 100 yards away. And finally there comes drift , a state in which “the tiniest whim is blown up to a Technicolor epic daydream.” Robinson provided drawings of three Tracedsuch dreams, including an older Beach resident fondly imagining a policeman’s arresting a yuppie newcomer for violating a law banning everyone from living at the Beach unless they have been there since 1965.
Most cartoonists, seeking the widest possible audience, pursue transcendent themes. Robinson, a 31-year-old Manhattan Beach native, has devoted himself to meticulously lampooning the curious clash of cultures that make up the Beach: the surfers and other bohemians who have grown up there and refuse to surrender their laid-back habits; the older families who moved there in the 1950s when the Beach offered low home prices; the yuppies whose real estate purchases and renovations have sent those home prices skyrocketing, and the outsiders--by Robinson’s standards, anyone who lives east of Ardmore Avenue, about half a mile from the shore.
Robinson, a tall, affable man, is a devoted bodysurfer and self-described “true local.” As he surveys the melange that is the Beach, weird notions bubble forth.
Stray Cat Portraits
He offers celebrity portraits of the various kinds of stray cats that are fawned on by residents of the Strand, the trendy and very expensive beachfront street that is the focus of most things Beach-like.
He analyzes the impossibility of finding a parking place, noting that locals get used to getting up at 5 in the morning to move their cars to the other side of the street and paying $150 to $180 a year for parking tickets. “Nothing tags someone as a Flatlander faster than becoming upset upon getting a parking ticket.”
Courageously, he stands up for tan lines. (“Forget tanning salons and just get an old-fashioned tan that says: ‘Yeah, I’ve got enough leisure time to lie on the beach for hours. Don’t you?’ ”)
He surveys the mad range of architecture along the Strand and notes that while the prices are preposterous, there is a hidden advantage: “On the Strand, you’re only hemmed in by jerks on three sides.”
True Locals Unemployed
He explains the theory of business at the Beach: “The true local hates leaving the Beach unless it’s for a very good reason. A job, obviously, doesn’t qualify. So most true locals are unemployed or just getting by. . . , but anyone who wants to work at the Beach and be successful will, eventually, have to go into business for himself.
“What type of business? Well, actually, at the Beach there are only three: liquor store, restaurant and real estate. Everything else is really a hobby, run eccentrically at the whim of its owner. Examples of these hobbies-disguised-as-businesses are travel agencies, boutiques and General Telephone.”
Robinson, who majored in computer science in college and makes his living as a free-lance graphic designer, never intended to become a newspaper cartoonist. About five years ago he read Cyra McFadden’s “The Serial,” a popular parody of psycho-babbling, upper-middle-class Marin County residents, and decided that the Beach could benefit from a similar treatment.
Hoping to persuade the Easy Reader to publish some installments of his writing, he drew a mock board game called “Making it at the Beach,” in which he offered points for achievements such as maintaining a perfect tan for 250 days without peeling or quitting a computer programming job at TRW to open a neon art gallery and gelato shop on Hermosa Avenue.
More Universal View
Robinson entered the board game in the Easy Reader’s annual cartoon contest, and the editors asked him to try sustaining his local satire each week.
These days, he’s expanding the column beyond the Beach in favor of a more universal world view. But he still seems to be the captive of a decidedly quirky and local sense of humor.
Just check out his Christmas list. For all those Beach residents tired of running out to move their cars from one-hour parking zones before the meter maid returns, Robinson has a sure-to-please gift:
“Yellow tires,” he said. “Same color as the meter maid’s chalk.”
