This is one man’s gasping attempt to record Los Angeles. His own Sunset Strip in the land of concrete breeze blocks, hollow freakishness and radical sleaze.
I remember with affection and awe a sight I have seen many times from a poolside perch of a friend’s house high up on the crazy slopes of Beverly Hills. As the evening sun cast orange black shadows through the haze of a hot landscape, a strange flat purple shroud reveals itself – a hovering, silent menace of photo-chemical smog. Angelenos are almost proud of it. It has been there so long. The smog to Los Angeles is what the pyramids are to Egypt. Ominously beautiful, it unites 4083 square miles of startling contrast and watches over a populous wreaking rich and wretched poor whose greatest industry spins dreams for the whole world and whose excesses spew out of the film sets and on to the streets reassembling themselves like scenery in an animated cartoon.
I am a stranger in this papier mache world, but I feel its plastic heartbeat and I can see its blood glow in neon tubes. I see also its huge joke and I laugh but to myself, for I know it is somebody’s religion and must be recognized as such.
The essence of this culture is the speed with which it can erect its icons and reinvent itself daily. To be unreal is to acknowledge its cardinal rule: anything is possible.
They have built the Tower of Babel up to heaven – sideways, and they are crossing the desert in a bid to reach hell.
Conventional good taste does not startle and therefore has no place here. Within its own context it does not need to concern itself with good or bad taste, but simply flavours of the month. Wildness rules and craves a wilder theme to pump its own adrenaline. Life must be up. There is no time for reflection.
Everything erected has a purpose and must state its case like an exploding bomb if it is to survive. It must be quick or tomorrow it will be something else entirely.
Three kinds of creatures live best in Los Angeles – crazy people, cockroaches and rats and they all must live somewhere.
Inside the hollow caverns of monstrous brown donuts, winsome cartoon characters and plaster-bound, square jawed hamburger eaters lurk the refugees from the sterilized world of breakfast coffee shops, brunch joints and cool, dark cocktail bars down below. It’s the only place left for them to go and if they can’t make it to the desert they must be content to live in these bizarre hidey holes with front doors that glow with good news neon messages declaring the best Mexican Tacos, all-nite massage, 365-day Laundromat and Christ is Risen. Out of sight and out of mind they would not dare to rub shoulders with the creatures on two legs who use tactics not unlike their own but with far more ruthless cunning.
Life down below is lived at a desperate pitch that would leave the average rat steaming like an old horse and a cockroach choking on its back.
There is laughter, of course, but it rises to cackling fever pitch to the sound of cascading money too many times a day, and that means nothing to a rat.
The instant and the new are the vital mainsprings that have created an art form with no roots in the sand, no rules and no aesthetic yardstick forged only by the power of what it has to sell. But it all had to start somehow and while the endless streams of pioneer sod-busters who left Independence, Missouri, in the early 1840s and made it finally to the Pacific West, didn’t actually start this trend in technicolour bawd, they may have sewn those early seeds of the line.
They were, after all, eager desperate souls, hungry for land and prosperity, otherwise they would never have attempted such a trek in the first place. They must have been acquisitive and prepared to suffer hellish privations and try anything that worked which could be construed as a sterling quality, whatever it finally wrought, though they can hardly be blamed directly, whatever it finally wrought, though they can hardly be blamed directly for the Disneyland that grew up by the name of Los Angeles.
They were in search of the fertile earthly paradise, the God given reward for pitting their courage against the wilderness.
Instead, they found a desert with little or no water which is no problem at all if you know where to look for it and if you have just travelled 2000 miles and crossed some of the greatest rivers you’d know where to look. So they tapped the Colorado River with a big pipe 300 miles long and behold a Fertile Earthly Paradise was born. With near tropical weather and limitless water on tap the place sprouted like an Amazonian jungle.
With the coming of the huddled masses, the discovery of oil, the invention of the internal combustion engine and cinematography, instant prosperity and the wildest of dreams were realized with the speed which the Angelinos have not made the slightest effort to stem to this day.
Today the place screams like a punkish whore bedecked with more layers of fluorescent colour and chrome-plated kitsch than a monster Wurlitzer.
Its shapes owe nothing to any idea but its own. If you are selling hotdogs then that is the perfect shape for a building and it tells the masses outside exactly what you are selling, so you don’t waste their time. It is the most logical mainline communication system yet devised. All you need to know from an architect, if that’s what you would call him, is whether the damned thing will stay up long enough to make a fast buck and get the hell out before the last customer has even spread his ketchup.
I forgive it all because it is so brutal and so honest and perhaps most because it is so like itself. I even respect it in a certain way as I respect a cobra or a killer whale.
I don’t want to live in it or buy it, write a sonnet on the banks of its flowing freeways. I seen no romance in the poolside scenery, no substance in the stupored lives of suntanned figures in a landscape; take no comfort from the frantic services offered around the clock, feel no warmth in the glow of a liquor store window in the early hours, or shudder with delight at this screaming life style. Then maybe I’m already gone. The victim of a glittering drug strewn along a thousand miles of sidewalk. A lousy B-movie actor who struts and frets his hour upon a tacky film set, and then is heard no more.
But the tale he had to tell if only he’d had the chance is already scrawled in swash- buckling neon letters on children’s building blocks anywhere you care to look – by the devil’s poet laureate himself in the kingdom of the blind where the one-eyed man wears shades and drives a white Cadillac.
"If anything else comes up- change your diet"
"Architecture is what ordinary folks dream of- and qualified fools design"
"Life is too short for long term benefits"
"I have a heart of Gold- but I'm not made of money"
"Do not let Poetry come between us
Lavish your desires and let slip
Take a word and love it like a dreamer
Who only yesterday was throwing old ladies on a rubbish tip"
"What goes without saying is invariably overstated"
Mid-Life Crash Course......
