Los Angeles began by a stream in a desert, in an area once known as iyáangẚ, “poison oak place,” by the Tongva people. Most of the world’s great cities were founded due to their advantageous geography, often by a long, deep river that facilitates trade and crops. The LA River was never a Seine, Hudson, or Tiber, but today it is, infamously, a trickle in a large concrete trench, a glorified drain. It is as if Los Angeles deliberately taunts the world’s other famous cities through parodically half-hearted imitation.
Los Angeles. Every time I go there, I feel it pushing me away.
You don’t belong here, it says. Leave.
And technically I don't. This is no place for me, or most of the other people here. The flat, empty basin between the mountains and the ocean where it rests is no natural place for a large town, let alone one of the most populous cities in America. The largest metropolis in California, a state named for a fictional paradise full of gold and monsters in a Spanish novel, can only sustain itself by pumping a great deal of its water through an aqueduct that begins several counties away, a big vampire of a town.
I’m a product of LA County. I was born in Torrance, and spent my childhood in Redondo Beach, a town with little presence in popular consciousness other than a brief reference to it as “the sticks” of LA County in Pulp Fiction. The shores of the Santa Monica Bay feel as much like home to me as anywhere else does. However, I never spent any great length of time in Los Angeles proper until I lived there for a few months in high school.
When circumstance put me in downtown, on Flower near Central Library, I was excited. This was the home of punk bands like Black Flag, a more “real” place than the suburbs I had spent the last decade in. Many Americans-- Millennials particularly, it seems, but Generation X-ers and Baby Boomers, too-- suffer from the paradigm of “pleasant=deceptive, unpleasant=real.” You can see this in the fan art of Disney princesses re-imagined as zombies or tattooed and pierced pin up girls that probably turns up in your Facebook feed or other neighborhoods of the Internet from time to time. Simultaneously reverencing and desecrating the movies we were raised on is probably one way of trying to reconcile the cynicism and hopeful sentimentality that sit together so uneasily in our minds. Los Angeles, while sometimes unpleasant, is no more “real” than any other city.
I remember my first day in the city. My dad had just left his apartment to see Götterdämmerung at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I scooped some anonymous change off of his dresser and strolled out the door and into the oppressive and ironic sunshine, looking for a pay phone to call my girlfriend. I never saw anyone else using a payphone. Everyone else, I guess, either had a cellphone or no one to call.
I walked by a homeless man in a gray t-shirt and a tutu. "Happy Halloween, sir," he said. "Happy Halloween." It was July.
"Happy Halloween to you, too," I told him.
He nodded sagaciously. "The Headless Horseman is coming. Happy Halloween."
I didn't really feel any sense of offbeat urban camaraderie after this exchange, or with any of the other people I talked to. It felt like we were all lost in our little worlds.
I got a coffee at a corner cafe. I loitered in the gardens in front of the library. I navigated around the waddling herds of complacent garbage-plumped pigeons in Pershing Square.
The city felt like it was inhabited by, or was, some smirking presence that was rebuffing all my attempts to be a part of it. Over the following months, that feeling never entirely went away. Without really noticing, I grew to accommodate myself to this feeling, to have affection for it as part of the environment I was inhabiting.
This is one of LA's many perverse charms. Few cities, after all, feel they are paying so much personal attention to you. It ignores you in an affected and unconvincing way, like a stranger in a coffee shop sizing you up from the corner while pretending to be engrossed in a newspaper.
Later that day, I got back to the apartment, sweaty, dazed and overstimulated, before realizing I had forgotten to look for a pay phone.
LA seemed grim and uncomfortable with itself to me; I had lived there while stewing in a decaying adolescent romance and fears of an uncertain future. However, every time I return, it retains the haunted atmosphere it had for me back then.
Other people seem to have noticed it too-Joan Didion, a local, captured the genus locus of uncertain dread the city has perfectly in her essay about the Santa Ana winds. Jack Kerouac pointed out the impracticality and absurdity of its existence by referring to it as a “huge desert encampment” in On the Road, and described it as “the loneliest and most brutal of American cities” where he “never felt sadder in his life.”
There’s a story about a man who is whisked away to the kingdom of the fairies, creatures who, according to one medieval explanation, are angels; degraded and in exile between Heaven and Hell after refusing to take sides in the celestial war between Michael and Satan. He spends the evening feasting and dancing with beautiful young lords and ladies until an illusion is dispelled, and he finds that he has really been sitting in the dark among grim, emaciated creatures eating dead leaves out of wooden bowls. Like the enticing netherworld of Celtic folklore, Los Angeles has the sinister feeling that it is the thin face of some unnerving reality which is cunningly concealing itself from you, something you glimpse from time to time out of the corner of your eye, something you feel everyone else is aware of too, but anxiously choosing to ignore. The benevolent Lady of the Angels is sometimes replaced by John Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci.
Los Angeles is elusive and illusive. It feels as if it's missing a center, like a system of planets orbiting a star that is invisible, or not there at all. Where, for example, does it begin and end? A map will tell you it has an odd shape, a bulge up at its top containing the San Fernando Valley, and a long strip going south connecting it to the ocean. However, the sense one gets is that LA is really just Los Angeles county and everything in it. While there are different shades of LA, different towns here with their own little facets of the LA experience-airy, clean, cosmopolitan Santa Monica, eerie, overgrown, peacock-infested Palos Verdes- the sense one often has is that this is all one place, one giant city, and that the distinction between most of its cities, other than some ethnic neighborhoods, is mostly legal and arbitrary. Sometimes when people say “LA” they also mean Orange County, which like its northern neighbor has an atmosphere of beguiling frivolousness and cheeriness haphazardly concealing lurking doom, though less acutely. To add to the ambiguity, it often seems that by convention “Hollywood” and “LA” are interchangeable.
People move to the city with certain expectations, positive and negative, gleaned from noir dramas, cop shows, the Oscars, and Tarantino films. These new Angelenos become part of the city, and their images and dreams do too. LA, therefore, continuously becomes a mentally recycled version of itself.
America in general is not a culture, nor a people, not in the way France, China, or Denmark are. America was founded by a people drunk on the Enlightenment, through revolution, for ideological reasons, in a land they did not belong in. It is the product not of geography and chance, but hopes, dreams, and doctrines. It did not balloon out of some particularly successful tribe, but is the conscious and modern creation of human minds.
Los Angeles began to become a major city because the film industry brought money and people flowing into it from across the world, and people still come to LA with their desperate hopes, not just for success in the film industry but in theater, in dance, in music, in literature, as it continues to swap places with New York for the title of America’s “serious” cultural center. Some of these people succeed, some of them don’t. If you talk to people on Skid Row chances are eventually you’ll run into some former actors, former producers, writers who thought, or still think, their big deal is just around the corner and that their lifestyle would just be an intriguing prelude to being the next Charles Bukowski. It’s a city that feeds on dreams, on making them, on breaking them, on sharing them, on inspiring them.
LA is mostly a mental space, rather than a physical one. Its presence in the literal world is only the tip of its iceberg. In this way, Los Angeles might be said to be the most American of cities.
After all, California is an America within America. My ancestors came west from Europe to America in search of better lives. Their descendants left the East Coast to go even further west in search of better ones. A lot of Californians have been people who needed a third chance.
Perhaps one day, Los Angeles will become so much the stuff of dreams that it will be absorbed into the noosphere and simply vanish, becoming as insubstantial as the beings in its name. Unless that happens, until it sinks like Atlantis into the Pacific with the rest of California, it will likely continue to be what it is: a venomous fairyland, a psychic slaughterhouse, America’s strange nightmare of itself, offering occasional glimpses of hope and beauty once in a while.
