The City is Never There
It's Time To Check In For Your Flight To Los Angeles
“Are we in Hollywood?”
“Yeah, I guess this is Hollywood already.”
“It doesn’t look like a city”
“Exactly… It looks like you’re coming to a city…But the city is never there.”
-from Lions Love (… and Lies) by Agnes Varda
Returning to Los Angeles after eight months is above all, deeply harmonious. The light, the diners, the flowers, the painted signs, the salads, the hills, the weed smoke, the pools, the palms, the breezes, my dog and family all live in this sprawl at the end of the country. This is my home, the place I dream of being old.I now live in New York, a place I dreamed of being young, where I am working and learning and growing. New York is if anything, incredibly definite in its locationality, it as an easy place to feel you are arriving into.
When I arrived home I was immediately suspicious of some way of knowing and being California(n) that had slipped away due to a lack of exposure. Could eight months transform me into a stranger? I was home for four days and without car insurance, meaning I couldn’t drive - akin to being a New Yorker allergic to gluten or subways or derangement. Who was I here without a car, an NYPL card in my wallet, and a partner and cat waiting for me in our Queens apartment? Would I be able to truly arrive back home?
I went to LACMA to visit an Ed Ruscha show that I quickly realized I had seen months ago at the MOMA. I found myself complaining about the bad lighting, a lack of “drama“, and generally inferior when compared to the high ceilings and wall-to-wall windows at MOMA. LACMA’s literal collection of Ruscha was bigger, as was the literalism of showing a burning LACMA campus hundreds of feet from the futuristic facelift of that campus. Seeing it here, what was there to yearn for? Ruscha’s art was a peak I saw myself driving towards here, still unreached. From New York, his work seemed familiar and personal in a far more definite way. Los Angeles seemed so much clearer from afar
Two months into living in New York City I met a strikingly grating Los Angeles to Bushwick transplant. He had attended one of the Los Angeles’ most elite and expensive private schools and was now passing time in Brooklyn wearing distressed Carhartt and planning a solo sailing expedition to “the Caribbean“. This person signaled his good Communist Angeleno intentions by reading Mike Davis’ seminal Los Angeles biography of power City of Quartz. With this odd little man as a sort of cursed lodestone, I purchased my own copy.
I still think about Davis’ first chapter in which he declares that “Los Angeles is usually seen as peculiarly infertile cultural soil, unable to produce, to this day [first printed in 1990], any homegrown intelligentsia.” He describes the various intellectuals imported from fascist Europe or the desperate literary luminaries turned Hollywood mercenaries of a “purer” United States. He notes the musings of UCLA semioticians who deride Los Angeles as an embodiment of a postmodern hell, a hyper-capitalist sprawl that seems to deny its inhabitants comfort or understanding. I think of the Palisades/Bushwick boy who tossed this book on his coffee table before going for pizza, who explained how much he preferred Bushwick and sailing to the Palisades, and who seemed more than eager to continue his anti-LA dossier with Davis’ snarky Commie crit.
But Davis also situates these conceptions and analyses within broader myths of the city, from the rhetoric of darkened noir to the propagandistic tourism speech of endless sun and an American Mediterranean. The underground art movements of Los Angeles that Davis mentions never seem to fit into these fantasies, nor within those of the transplants who always end up finding the American emptiness where they want to find it. Davis’ critical analysis of the city and its players seems to come from a love of the land beyond its fantasy. With these fixed and imaginary views of Los Angeles, you can drive towards them and never find them for eternity.
Some people feel that in an age of digital excess and cultural homogeneity we need more gatekeeping. If so, Los Angeles may be regarded as a land of gates: it expands endlessly, its resources are vast, it is one of the most diverse cities in the country, and most of the “homegrown intelligentsia“ that are so hard for Davis’ critics to locate are already relatively obscure.
Mostly though, Los Angeles contains an extensive breadth of art. There’s the parking lot of a gas station turned dispensary that hosts a taco truck on weeknights only after 9 PM close to strip malls with Michelin star restaurants. There are endless square-shaped art galleries in and around Hollywood with their towering gates and foliage, some sensational and arcane and others bloated and Instagramable. There are the expensive repertory film houses, the flashy ones, and the run-down ones with one-dollar popcorn. There are no flagship stores for the avant-fashion brands of New York, Tokyo, and London, but endless glassy curated storefronts offering varied visions of fashion worlds owned and redefined by the city.
It’s hard to find what you’re looking for here, but it likely exists within the endless sprawl.
After LACMA I decided on a short walk down La Brea to Union, one of my favorite clothing stores in the world. It was a 30 minute walk, unconscionable to the Los Angeles imagination, and spent walking by a fair share of parking lots, blank walls, and chain stores. When I arrived at Union after 8 months, I was startled to receive a warm “welcome back“. If you have ever window-shopped for expensive clothes, you will know that one is rarely treated this way. I will admit I was touched by this small kindness, perhaps even a mistake. I felt incorporated into the fold and knowledge of Union, I felt returned to the city, arrival in a wholely new sense.
Cookie Meuller once wrote that 1980s New York galleries “can be scary—not because the art is shocking or because the art-hopping hobnobbers are dressed in a frightening manner, but because you can never be sure that what you are seeing is the truth.“ There is a question of where, in sites of music/art/film performance ends and “realness“ begins. I’ve never known in New York exactly when I have punctured the depths to arrive at “realness“.
It is exceedingly rare, and perhaps rightfully so. In Los Angeles it takes cutting through, navigating, and redefining the sprawl to your own logic. One must cut their own grooves in the endless canyons of the city, stretching one’s self out until they approach the real. Where else, in an age of instant access, can you work and drive and truly search for that which you love?
The first summer I lived in New York I saw a trailer for the film Los Angeles Plays Itself - a documentary about the city using footage from old movies as a way of teaching the history and spirit of the city. The documentary mentions the “tourists” of Hollywood, the directors who came to the city to make movies depicting Los Angeles with varying degrees of accuracy. “Bad“ tourists are described as leaning on stereotype and preconception. They do not explore, they seek examples for that which they already know. “Good” tourists ask questions, they learn, they struggle with the city, they journey. Agnes Varda and her Los Angeles trilogy including Lions Love (… and Lies) is noted for its exceptional approach to tourism.
Perhaps the most exceptional thing about returning home was to find myself a tourist, out of synch with the city’s rhythms and patterns. This did not mean my separation from home was permenantly alienating, it meant I could eperience the rare moment of re-experiencing the city as new - of driving into Los Angeles as a tourist. The blessing of leaving home is to fall in love with it all over again, and again, and again. Even in leaving Los Angeles, I can see its shadow in the distance ahead. Los Angeles is always in front of me.