Petrea made me stop and think this morning (not a rare occurrence as her writing is so consistently thought provoking).
What she made me stop and think about was this:
Why the hell am I so obsessively interested in the history of Los Angeles?
It's not as if I want to live there; good God, no! I want to live here and in Paris (and it looks like I'm going to have to settle for here).
She's right, though. I may be fascinated by Paris and London and even New York, but with LA it's more of an obsession.
I think I might be beginning to understand why, and it's not just the sunshine and the beautiful Art Deco buildings …
I think it's because LA is the ultimate exhibitionist.
Little over a hundred years ago there was just the occasional ranch and orange grove, crumbling Spanish mission houses and the ragged remnants of the Tongva and Chumash nations. You can see it all in black and white, sitting peacefully in the sun in early photographs.
Then came oil … but far more importantly, along came a nascent moving picture industry desperate for long, sunny days to save costs on lights. Los Angeles was born, grew up, threw tantrums and went batshit crazy in all our cinemas and on all our TV screens.
You might just be able to form a mental picture of what pre-Roman London might have looked like, and you can get an all too real impression of the suppurating growth of the Great Wen from Pepys and Dickens; but nobody will ever know for sure how it all looked or sounded (or smelled) and how it grew and spread. That goes for just about every other city on earth.
But not Los Angeles …
LA loves the lens. Its entire history is available on celluloid and it's a real strumpet in front of the cameras.
I was brought up on Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and the Keystone Kops. From there I wandered, via DW Griffith through to Sunset Boulevard and at last stumbled upon the LA I fell madly and irrationally in love with: the LA of Kiss Me Deadly. The LA of my obsession.
Boy, what an impact that movie had on me (and still does).
Ever since then I've sat here in the rain, living vicariously in the sunny postwar LA of wisecracking, punchy private dick Mike Hammer; from the moody black and white of Kiss Me Deadly to the bright, harsh, saturated colours of Chinatown and L.A.Confidential it grabbed me and never let go.
From wolfing down the noir heaven of Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler I discovered the books of James Ellroy; hardboiled, racist, misogynist corrupt and violent cops and politicians whose stories played out against the real history of LA.
And what a history that was! It's all there, splayed across the screen in celluloid and scrawled across the pages of a thousand great pulp trash crime novels. A city usually takes two thousand years to grow and mature; Los Angeles crammed it all into a few short decades of boom and bust, corruption, greed, insane politics, water wars, race riots …
And still it goes on; plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Watching LA's awkward puberty from a distance via movies and TV is morbidly fascinating; like watching a slow motion car crash, or an orgy in a circus freak show tent, or … well … a city with no shame, proudly displaying itself naked to the world and seemingly glorying in its sleaze and violence … the zoot suit riots, the battle of Chavez Ravine, the Watts riots, the global coverage of Rodney King's vicious beating … It's not like that really (or at least mostly) but the nice side of LA rarely gets put on display to the world.
LA has recently spread from celluloid through comic books (the immaculate Love and Rockets, yay!) to the games console and I regularly take vacations there in 1990s gangland style South Central LA (Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and the upcoming GTA5) and in the postwar boom of the superb cop game "LA Noire" which is just like living inside an Ellroy novel. If you've seen L.A.Confidential, imagine climbing into a squad car with the guys and fighting crime and corruption (complete with classic femmes fatales). It's truly awesome.
Yet apparently the real Los Angeles is not like that at all …
There are farmers' markets, bistros, normal folk walking their dogs and sharing coffee, there are gourmet bakeries and microbreweries, for Pete's sake! Petrea drives to work in Hollywood and has been posting photos from her commute, and it's lovely. LOVELY!
I'll probably never get there so I'll never know what it's really like, yet LA fascinates me like no other place.
Paris is Paris. It's grown slowly. It is what it is. London and New York are what they are; yet the City of Angels craves being all things to all people; it's the wannabe starlet sprawled across the casting couch … "I can be whatever you want me to be, sugar. I don't mind, just GET ME IN THE MOVIES!"
Los Angeles exists, physically; it's there on the map: a huge, monstrous, sprawling metropolis smeared across Southern California; the sheer, mind-buggering size of it is beyond belief … and yet my Los Angeles is ephemeral; the LA of Kiss Me Deadly is long gone; it is a city that exists almost entirely in my imagination.
And I love it.
5 comments:
I've got lots of places on my "wish I could visit list," but L.A. isn't one of them. Whenever I think of L.A. I think of smog and gangs. Never had the urge to go there or to California. Hubby liked San Diego, though, and said he'd like to go there with me.
BTW, I keep forgetting to tell you I bought two Andreas Scholl CD. WOW! He's like a magic elixir for stress. Thanks for introducing me to him.
I wouldn't mind visiting LA, Katherine, but I don't think I could stand living there (or indeed anywhere in the States … at my age, I love my free healthcare too much).
Yay for Andreas Scholl! How weird it would be if we started a craze for countertenors.
Your comments reminded me of a quote I saw recently on Venice Daily Photo:
"If you read a lot, nothing is as great as you've imagined. Venice is – Venice is better." Fran Lebowitz
When I was younger I dreamed of Venice, and still do. My impressions of the city, as well as of Paris, London and Athens, were formed by the spy novels of Helen MacInnes. I've never much wanted to go to LA and definitely don't care for seeing Las Vegas, but I still want to see Venice. Maybe that's why I like to walk along the Central Canal downtown (where they even have a Venetian boat!)
Oh, yeah, there were also Dick Francis mysteries based in the various racing towns of England that have given me a taste of the countryside. A friend and I would dearly love to visit Goodwood, too, to see the Historic races in September, which might mean I could see some beautiful Thoroughbred racers of both the equine and male persuasions!
I want to take the time to visit as though I lived in those cities, not with a tour. I doubt that it will ever come to reality, but seeing the cities through the various blogs has been a nice way to live vicariously through pictures.
City of Angels, city of dreams -- and dreams gone sour. I've been to LA. It's a fascinating place, but I wouldn't want to live there. I do love the glimpses I get of Pasadena and Altadena through blog friends. They sound so interesting.
I also really enjoy the glimpses of Norwich, London, that you give us. Paris, Rome, Venice, from other blog friends. So many places, imagination and dreams....
Thank you for sharing yours, Dive.
I've got the Venice bug, too, Speedway. I can actually get on a train at my village station, change at London for the Orient Express and get off in Venice, but that costs way more than flying and you have to dress up like Agatha Christie characters. Weird.
I'd cope with Venice a lot better than you as I'm anosmic and a lot of the time Venice stinks to high Heaven, and when it doesn't, it's cold, damp and rainy. I keep a Venice webcam on my Mac's Dashboard and live it vicariously.
I really wouldn't want to live in LA, Ms.M. though I would love to visit it and see those few iconic places that are still left from the LA of my dreams, and then spend Parade Time in Pasadena and go hiking with Petrea, John and Boz.
First, however, I need to buy a winning lottery ticket.
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