The Good Knight Inn

Occasional unscrolling of a quest to decode the meaning of medieval culture in Los Angeles.

9247 Sepulveda Blvd, Los Angeles

Will there be beds for me and all who seek?

Yes, beds for all who come.

-Christina Rossetti

For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital.

-Thomas Browne

Well nothin' bothers me tonight.

  -Gram Parsons

Inscribed in medievally but readable font on a shield-shaped sign seen while driving down Sepulveda, The Good Knight Inn promises a rest from world-weariness.

The pun is as awful as a pork pie bought at a British import store. But wordplay has its own encoded wisdom. The Good Knight Inn demands that we – the paying guests of this temporary earthly vacation – define our quality criteria.

What is the good that is sought? Is it the oblivion of sleep, weighted to the earth, the hill as your headrest. Or is it a night light and lusty, the making of the beast with two backs.

Why are you here? Where are you going. What is your heart’s desire.

The pun skewers these existential questions with the poise and accuracy of a knight jousting for his lady.

*

Maybe – The Good Knight Inn holds the key to this city. Some clue unearthed on the road. Borrowed from another world, forged in a foreign land, encrypted – but not forgotten – within the knight’s code.

The confusion is included in the price of the room. Every motel accommodates the doubleness of desire – is it sex we seek, or sleep? – but only rarely is that offering made explicit. At The Good Knight Inn, ambivalence gives rise to an aesthetics of restlessness; an architecture strung between gingerbread innocence and Chaucerian bawd.

Those symptoms – flinty fortifications and flat-pack crenellations – props and costumes of heaviness in tension with the paste and pleasure of lightness. Rest assured – the theme does not reach into the rooms. The load-bearing beams and diamond-paned windows are only tentatively three dimensional, the dark horror of the old world made safe by thin surfaces.

For there is not enough here to support or defend. A relief sculpture, a momentary uprising against flat blue background.­­­­ A culture of consumption cannot sustain quest – the space between, closed too quickly – and stories without stakes will produce crooked fantasies – stone predisposed to bloating, a tower twists and twirls to a witch’s hat turret, solidity is siphoned into white and yellow parking lines, gothic lettering of “office” curdled of cottage, those privacy-hedge remnants will stand in for the forest.

No other motel on the Sepulveda strip so straightforwardly expresses the rot of nostalgia. Not the Pink Cloud, nor the Palm Tree Inn, nor Hotel Starlight – low-cost hospitality options happy to capitalize on the cosmic softness and aerospace ecstasy of Southern California. Kitted out chrome and fins and the trappings of car-culture, these motels are aligned with the purpose they serve. They swim in the waters they are in, immersed in the airy aspirations that sustain our appetite for this place. They are in it for the good life.

But The Good Knight Inn – squat and diminutive and awkwardly honest in its debt to the stage set – is positioned to be out of place. Its architecture is its marketing: European history compressed to storybook, development diverted before the arrival of the automobile, a passing reference to a place slowed to breaking point, just a ripple and attempt to prevent the flow of time.

*

I decide this is not a style of marketing that works upon me. Driving past, I can feel the resistance. This geometry of dung, and straw, and small dark windows – will not disrupt the aerodynamics of my buxom and dusty 2009 Toyota Camry. Why would I stay somewhere so close to home.

For another, raised without cloud cover, The Good Knight Inn might appear desirable; an unwounded world in which to hide for a while. This is the innocence that is missed. But approached from another angle – English, not of here – I suspect the Inn’s issue is it knows too much.

This proclivity for wordplay, this staging of coexisting contradictions – the Inn riddles and worries at the dynamics of desire, exposing those antagonistic mechanics – and so misses the mark of being desirable.

Because it is just not comfortable to stay where desire is not straightforward. When all we wanted was a vacation. This push and pull – this forwards and backwards – does not feel profitable, does not inspire my spending.

The nightly standoff between sleeping and sex. The quest in tension with the craving to regress. Desire made inflamed by the cold in-between and the ending kept-existing by persistent not-reaching. Exhaustion deferred by staying on the road. 

To stay, on the road. This is the point and promise of the motel, the loophole that ties the knot between time and motion. By taking on the tropes of the roadside attraction – novelty, contextual oddity, erratic thematics – The Good Knight Inn clips the difference between dawdling and destination. It is a tiny trap, a triangular syllogism. 

If, as the sign says, the good knight is the one who stops at the inn, then his wandering twin is cast in the role of knight errant, the quester in search of adventure, condemned to choose the mazy way.

The former is defined by what he is – or is judged to be – the latter by what he does and doesn’t do. It is a matter of grammar: one reputation precedes, the other chases after.  

Ready in his accomplishment, the good knight rests. Goodness is his, he knows where he is going.

The knight errant lives by the rhythms of the lost; the direction of his journey re-distilled to new desires, definitions of the good divergent and passing, each as sharp and splintered as a lance.

They say the shape of the quest is the state of his soul. And his hope at each stage – that today’s craving might crystallise to destination, might eliminate the difference between here and there.

His heart’s desire; only orientation, the forcefield that determines the vectors and contours, the carving of the journey, his and ours.

And to err – to rove and to wander and locate the goodness that’s his own  -- the knight errant must have a script to stray from.

From here – he may only and must depart from where we are. And so his source of chivalry must be – Californian.

*

Who and what is this sign, this character, the good knight. A man without qualities, granted the armour of a code of characteristics. A code, prescribed by the court and rewritten by the road.

In California, the chivalric criteria are not so difficult to discern. From The Good Knight Inn, it’s a straight shot along the 5 – as the crow flies – to Buena Park, to join the line for this evening’s performance of Medieval Times.

It is a two-hour dinner experience. A procession of dishes in different sauces; dignitaries with different voices, served while watching a tournament.

And contained like a plum or a bird or a crown within the rind or the crust or the shell of this stage – a clue.

Simply follow the furrows entrenched by generations and the cosmology of this court becomes clear. The stage is quadrilateral, the bleachers unequal, preferred seating and early-access predetermined by royal decree – packages progressively ranked by tithes – in this democracy by fee, upgrades and add-ons are always accessible.

For the customer is king in this zone of inverted adventure, this micro-society in a micro world. And at what cost. Before we breach the castle walls, waiting as fated to validate our tickets, there may still be time to identify what it is we are seeking – which is to say, how much we are paying to escape.

But check-in is efficient and the line moves quickly – no time to question, no room for doubt – and when the parchment is passed over you are delivered to the photo booth where you will pose as ingenues, pale squires as yet untouched by the virtues of courtly love and the rigours of the brave and it is here, in captured grin, that you submit to your role as participant, as observer.

Here at the threshold you will renounce the superiority of the chronicler’s autonomy, that amulet of glinty irony. To see, you must believe. And if you thought the photo was yours for free, then that is just a sign of your lack of clarity, of knightly perspicacity, because it is of the order of this court and the honorable franchise that a sale must be made and in exchange you will be granted the assurance and relief and respite that there will be no surprises – no expectation left unstaged – for all is pre-written, above-board, no trap doors, the arena of performance is vacuum-sealed to your needs.

[…]

Scroll temporarily sealed / knight captured, stony, and asleep while scribe otherwise enchanted.