City Collage: Los Angeles

“I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” ~Andy Warhol

So I've decided to begin a series of posts on cities that have figured into my life in complex ways. These may be cities I love, hate (though I can't think of any of those), or feel ambivalent about, but they are all cities that have, in some way, shaped the internal landscape of my imagination. I am not going to write about my experiences in these cities (usually), but how they exist in my mind.

If you were to ask Patrick what city has most completely consumed his fanciful daydreams, I am pretty sure he would say it was New York. I have an extremely difficult time deciding what city fills that role for me, since it has varied from time to time throughout my life. Therefore, I've decided to do a collection of posts about several cities. The textual/aural/visual collage format is such because I can't think of a better way to express the sensory overload of these cities and the ways in which they inhabit my waking fancy.


In spite of my inability to narrow my list of compelling cities, when I first conceived of this project I was consumed by thoughts of only one city: Los Angeles.


As you read this post about LA, I urge you to click the play button below for Ryan Adams' "La Cienega Just Smiled":

I've given this collage an accompanying playlist; if it offers nothing more inspiring, it certainly helps establish the mood of my Los Angeles.


Now, LA is not my favorite city in the world, by any stretch, nor is it where I've most enjoyed living. I suppose it probably does have the best weather of anywhere I've inhabited, but that's beyond the purview of this post. It's dirty, it's crowded, and it practically seethes with the desperation of unfulfilled yearning. The ostentatiousness and superficiality is overwhelming, and at times the pressure of an entire city at once striving for false promise can be crushing.

But when Los Angeles creeps into my mind, what creeps is not the concrete reality of living in it, but rather abstraction and color. These are usually the dripping, sun-drenched, molten colors of a smoggy dusk, best experienced as you drive around the bend of Sunset Boulevard where it meets La Cienega as the sun sets just past the hills (Beverly, of course). At this time of day, and in my imagination, Los Angeles looks like it is ablaze, the unabashed striving of its inhabitants fueling an unforgiving and constantly replenishing inferno.




This blaze then quietly slips into the purple depths of twilight, softening the harshness of day and sunset. Without the sun, LA seems to lose itself somewhat, the glaring brightness replaced with a balmy, gentle dusk.





After twilight, of course, comes night in LA. Now the colors shift to noir: chiaroscuro shadows playing tricks on the eye in each and every hidden, hedonistic corner of the city. At night, you almost feel as if you are in a pre-technicolor film, all the color leeched from the world leaving only an infinite palate of gray. This is a Los Angeles of loneliness and despair, of private eyes and femmes fatale, but it is a pleasingly aesthetic despair: even in sorrow and emptiness there resides the hope that this desperation may become a screenplay or a pilot or a novel.


LA Day: "No Blue Sky," The Thorns




For me, Los Angeles in the day loses all its color, all its mythology. Midday brings a garish brightness that blanches the pigment from the earth, leaving only a washed-out imprint of what is actually there, like when you close your eyes after looking at the sun too long and it leaves traces of light on the inside of your eyelids. This is the LA of beaches and summer and vacations, yes, but also suffocating smog and traffic and dusty, dirty desert.



In the end, it's hard for me to say what's so compelling about my imaginary Los Angeles. I think it is the paradox of the place, and how it embodies a sort of gorgeous melancholy. Perhaps, as Denise Hamilton claims, it is both "the seductive blur of artifice and reality, the possibility of shucking off the past like last year's frock and reinventing yourself beyond your wildest dreams" as well as "the desperation that descends when the dream goes sour, the duplicity that lurks behind the beauty, the rot of the jungle flowers, the riptides off the sugar sand beaches that carry away the unwary."

Either way, I hold Los Angeles close in the back of my mind.

~L