BIKINI-GIRL BAROMETER : Fast-Food Art Is Frequently a Tip-Off to the Nation’s Economic Mood and Future

When news guys want to tell you how the country’s doing, they’re always citing the percentage of increase in something they call “consumer confidence,” which is probably derived by asking a lot of people in Idaho what they think about their toasters.

Some people, even some real economists, use hemlines as a bellwether of the nation’s mood--the more leg you see on a supermodel, the happier Wall Street seems to be--and others seem to be able to predict a market downturn by the rapid decline in the number of glossy night-life magazines subsidized wholly by Absolut ads. For years, a friend of mine has accurately charted business cycles by determining whether Madonna is currently more popular among tenured academics or 14-year-old girls. (It’s swinging back toward teen-agers; hold on to your bonds.)

My favorite way to read the mood of the city used to be by counting the number of bikini girls painted on window signs in the hamburger stands southeast of Downtown. You’ve seen those signs--smiling women in go-go poses, quickly sketched on sheets of neon-green poster paper, juxtaposed with gargantuan tacos, two-story cups of Pepsi and cheeseburgers three times as large as the girls’ heads.

And the forecasting is easy: When a local plant closes, the bikini girls thin out, to be replaced by more pragmatic signs that feature paintings of pastrami sandwiches and tuna combo plates. When local employment picks up, out come the girls again, regular as daffodils. I tend to read them as potent symbols of optimism, these hamburger women, painted with the kind of wasp waists and sculpted legs nearly impossible to maintain on a diet of the double-bacon cheeseburgers they promote. Their saucy Vargas-girl poses hark back to a time of easy prosperity; their luminescent red lips hint to burger eaters a better future of shrimp cocktails and steak.

The best signs--sinuous, painterly, sensual down to the painting of the $1.49 quesadilla--all seemed to be the work of an anonymous sign painter so ubiquitous that I took to calling him the Bikini Master of Huntington Park. He could really paint a bag of fries, this guy, but what made his work so special was an abrupt break from the flat, mudflap-girl sensibility of his peers into a fluid, almost Renoir-like line. I tried to find the Bikini Master a few years ago. I poked my head into sign shops from one end of Cudahy to the other and questioned countless night managers of taco stands, but I never found anybody who owned up to painting those signs. (I did find an impostor once, in a shop near USC, who claimed to specialize in bikini girls. But his samples displayed mostly bootleg Disney characters.)

I drove around last week to look again for the Bikini Master and maybe get a bearing on South L.A. after the passage of Proposition 187. There was something of a sign-painting renaissance in full swing. Lush, impossible foliage enveloped the fronts of bakeries; hissing snakes entwined the entrances of pet shops. There were two-story jungle murals, beautifully rendered maps of Mexico, Aztec calendars, bright baskets of fruit that Carmen Miranda would have been proud to wear on her head.

The coming thing in sign painting seems to be representations of products, bottles of detergent, Roach Motels, steel wool and soup cans, TV dinners and motor oil, more beautifully detailed than anything Andy Warhol ever put to canvas. Certain sections of Soto south of the Farmer John mural feel like drive-through galleries of Pop art. Could this trend signal a return to the go-go cynicism of the ‘60s, or is it just the ‘80s corporate materialism that’s become newly respectable again? Is it just a soup can on a fence? But I was looking for the bikini girls, and as I drove around, I noticed that the hamburger stands seemed unusually sedate. Sure, there were paintings of hamburgers; sure, there were beautifully illustrated burritos, but I found no bikini girls at all.