III. Drugs and Rock n Roll: Written in January, 2006.
My last visit to L.A. was part of a month-long Southwestern road trip, during which time I passed through the city a handful of times without ever really getting a handle on it. I was overwhelmed and unimpressed. L.A. struck me as a series of endless strip malls; a “produce and consume” society in which hurried lawyer’s wives chugged about, shoving nutrient-deficient drive-thru food down their gullets as their middle schoolers gossiped over which Hollywood flash-in-the-pan was at their mall after class. At the time, I had pigeonholed the city into a box exemplifying all that was wrong with American society and post-industrial capitalism. Poorly laid out, superficial and alienating, Los Angeles was like the set of cancerous lungs I had viewed in a cadaver exhibit at the city’s Natural History Museum: though the Marlboro Man zeitgeist of Hollywood culture had comprehensively intoxicated the world’s inundated mind, nowhere did I find the disease most advanced than in the carrying body itself. Naturally, I presumed, L.A. would be the first to fall victim to the poisoned onslaught of its own perfectly marketed excess and self-absorption.
Reductive and thoroughly undeveloped (if not wholly untrue), I came to reject this rather Marxist interpretation of the city this time around. Busing around town (literally, I didn’t seem to go anywhere) I found there to be several classic American themes which emanate across L.A.’s intestine-like highway system and the tangle of neighborhoods it envelops. Among them: Hollywood popular culture/film/cult of the celebrity, referred to by locals simply as “the Industry;” the simultaneous symbolism of individual freedom juxtaposed against slavish dependency upon the car; and the anarchic relations of applied libertarianism (an ideology which crosses partisan lines here).
To a degree, it’s all partially accurate: whilst there I met and knew of numerous Angelenos whose largest calling card is having a sister who partied with Paris Hilton. I’ve also not come across a comparable public transportation system so obstinate and utterly inept at carrying people around the city’s major locations. Indeed, in the 1930s, General Motors scrapped the city’s existing electric train system, creating L.A.’s famously congested auto dependency. And here, as Pico Iyer notes, everybody lives side by side without having any idea how she correlates or where she fits in relation to the next person.
However, the real clincher to all of this is the absolute hegemony of it all. The idea of Los Angeles, which at its core is the popular idea of post-World War II America, has a grip so uniformly entrenched throughout the minds of my generation that one can’t help but be swayed by its trans-national leveling power. Social mobility, the primacy of the individual and personal choice, maximalist living, the pursuit of self-perfection; within much of the world, these notions are now the philosophical bedrock of my fellow baby-of-baby-boomer generation. This is not so much about capitalist economics; it has more to do with complete cultural empire.
When the revolution eventually stalled in its decidedly un-groovy bastardization - Stalinism - and when our hippie parents grew bored with Karma and chose Commerce instead, it was Uncle Reagan, former Californian governor (and Aunty Thatcher), who was left to raise us. Los Angeles was our generation’s breastfeeding nanny, nursing us along with reruns of “Rocky” and spin-offs of “Clueless.” She watered down Reaganomics and offered us the powder milk version, flavoring the mixture with neo-McCarthyist rhetoric (“Evil Empire,” “lone superpower”) and consumer culture overdoses.
Besides being the headquarters of all of these dominant ideas, L.A.’s inhabitants follow a lifestyle that is freer, more ostentatious and more outsized than in any other place I’ve visited. They seem to approach life like a Sunday fish market: raw, aggressive, devoid of subtlety. I found this in the steely Korean woman who joked in Spanish with her stall neighbor in an all-Hispanic market. Then, in Koreatown itself, I found it in the attire of young professional Koreans, dressed out of a Vanity Fair magazine, sipping on Frappucinos purchased from a bilingual Starbucks menu. There were Hummers trundling along every highway. Nowhere that I visited did it seem that people could resist the allure of attaining pre-wrapped samadhi, each one living out their own (albeit, personally fashioned) global-by-way-of-American dream.
On the train ride out towards the suburbs of San Bernardino Valley, a group of colleagues frittered endlessly over countertop renovation choices and prices (apparently, if one isn’t getting frequent flyer miles from Home Depot, their family’s vacation time is suffering). On Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, a gay couple purchased the perfect final adornment for a dinner party at the specialty cheese store. The counterculture intelligentsia/vintage store brigade go at it endlessly on MySpace bulletin board battles. There’s no resistance when the resistance movement has been commodified, quite some years ago, and American Idol contestants are singing Iggy Pop.
Whether you’re on top of the system or in the middle of it, satirizing its absurdities or being marginalized by it, L.A. symbolizes the uni-paradigmatic essence of living in a postmodern 21st Century. This creed is equally persuasive today, if not more so, in other countries. Over dinner in Orange County, a senior administrator in the U.C. system told me of his surprise when China’s vice minister of Education divulged to him that her son is working for a billion dollar I.T. enterprise in Arizona. If ever we had a shot at maintaining peaceful relations with China, doping its youth into entering the global rat race might just be it. It already looks like the Indians are on board.
If I were a post-structuralist, I’d call it the “semiology of pursuit.” As a Baudrillard devotee, you could label it the “meta-narrative of purpose.” If you were George W. Bush, you could call it “free people doing freedom-type things.” An Angeleno could call it, well…”life.”
Fittingly, the show I viewed at the Museum of Contemporary Art annex in Little Tokyo was on the effects of ecstasy. One of the exhibits features a dozen psychedelic super-sized magic mushrooms and a blissed-out blue character patterned after Mickey Mouse, all crafted out of brightly painted plastic. MoCA’s curator, whilst giving a guided tour, explained the difficulty that museum staff had maintaining this particular exhibit.
“The kids will just hug and climb on top of the mushrooms,” he said, receiving the subdued bemusement of his artsy audience.
It seems quite clear to me that these children are simply following the suit of the current generation: my own. We're all seemingly on one massive, group trip in pursuit of an unattainable happiness, and nobody, it seems, is ready to let go for the inevitable come down.
My last visit to L.A. was part of a month-long Southwestern road trip, during which time I passed through the city a handful of times without ever really getting a handle on it. I was overwhelmed and unimpressed. L.A. struck me as a series of endless strip malls; a “produce and consume” society in which hurried lawyer’s wives chugged about, shoving nutrient-deficient drive-thru food down their gullets as their middle schoolers gossiped over which Hollywood flash-in-the-pan was at their mall after class. At the time, I had pigeonholed the city into a box exemplifying all that was wrong with American society and post-industrial capitalism. Poorly laid out, superficial and alienating, Los Angeles was like the set of cancerous lungs I had viewed in a cadaver exhibit at the city’s Natural History Museum: though the Marlboro Man zeitgeist of Hollywood culture had comprehensively intoxicated the world’s inundated mind, nowhere did I find the disease most advanced than in the carrying body itself. Naturally, I presumed, L.A. would be the first to fall victim to the poisoned onslaught of its own perfectly marketed excess and self-absorption.
Reductive and thoroughly undeveloped (if not wholly untrue), I came to reject this rather Marxist interpretation of the city this time around. Busing around town (literally, I didn’t seem to go anywhere) I found there to be several classic American themes which emanate across L.A.’s intestine-like highway system and the tangle of neighborhoods it envelops. Among them: Hollywood popular culture/film/cult of the celebrity, referred to by locals simply as “the Industry;” the simultaneous symbolism of individual freedom juxtaposed against slavish dependency upon the car; and the anarchic relations of applied libertarianism (an ideology which crosses partisan lines here).
To a degree, it’s all partially accurate: whilst there I met and knew of numerous Angelenos whose largest calling card is having a sister who partied with Paris Hilton. I’ve also not come across a comparable public transportation system so obstinate and utterly inept at carrying people around the city’s major locations. Indeed, in the 1930s, General Motors scrapped the city’s existing electric train system, creating L.A.’s famously congested auto dependency. And here, as Pico Iyer notes, everybody lives side by side without having any idea how she correlates or where she fits in relation to the next person.
However, the real clincher to all of this is the absolute hegemony of it all. The idea of Los Angeles, which at its core is the popular idea of post-World War II America, has a grip so uniformly entrenched throughout the minds of my generation that one can’t help but be swayed by its trans-national leveling power. Social mobility, the primacy of the individual and personal choice, maximalist living, the pursuit of self-perfection; within much of the world, these notions are now the philosophical bedrock of my fellow baby-of-baby-boomer generation. This is not so much about capitalist economics; it has more to do with complete cultural empire.
When the revolution eventually stalled in its decidedly un-groovy bastardization - Stalinism - and when our hippie parents grew bored with Karma and chose Commerce instead, it was Uncle Reagan, former Californian governor (and Aunty Thatcher), who was left to raise us. Los Angeles was our generation’s breastfeeding nanny, nursing us along with reruns of “Rocky” and spin-offs of “Clueless.” She watered down Reaganomics and offered us the powder milk version, flavoring the mixture with neo-McCarthyist rhetoric (“Evil Empire,” “lone superpower”) and consumer culture overdoses.
Besides being the headquarters of all of these dominant ideas, L.A.’s inhabitants follow a lifestyle that is freer, more ostentatious and more outsized than in any other place I’ve visited. They seem to approach life like a Sunday fish market: raw, aggressive, devoid of subtlety. I found this in the steely Korean woman who joked in Spanish with her stall neighbor in an all-Hispanic market. Then, in Koreatown itself, I found it in the attire of young professional Koreans, dressed out of a Vanity Fair magazine, sipping on Frappucinos purchased from a bilingual Starbucks menu. There were Hummers trundling along every highway. Nowhere that I visited did it seem that people could resist the allure of attaining pre-wrapped samadhi, each one living out their own (albeit, personally fashioned) global-by-way-of-American dream.
On the train ride out towards the suburbs of San Bernardino Valley, a group of colleagues frittered endlessly over countertop renovation choices and prices (apparently, if one isn’t getting frequent flyer miles from Home Depot, their family’s vacation time is suffering). On Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, a gay couple purchased the perfect final adornment for a dinner party at the specialty cheese store. The counterculture intelligentsia/vintage store brigade go at it endlessly on MySpace bulletin board battles. There’s no resistance when the resistance movement has been commodified, quite some years ago, and American Idol contestants are singing Iggy Pop.
Whether you’re on top of the system or in the middle of it, satirizing its absurdities or being marginalized by it, L.A. symbolizes the uni-paradigmatic essence of living in a postmodern 21st Century. This creed is equally persuasive today, if not more so, in other countries. Over dinner in Orange County, a senior administrator in the U.C. system told me of his surprise when China’s vice minister of Education divulged to him that her son is working for a billion dollar I.T. enterprise in Arizona. If ever we had a shot at maintaining peaceful relations with China, doping its youth into entering the global rat race might just be it. It already looks like the Indians are on board.
If I were a post-structuralist, I’d call it the “semiology of pursuit.” As a Baudrillard devotee, you could label it the “meta-narrative of purpose.” If you were George W. Bush, you could call it “free people doing freedom-type things.” An Angeleno could call it, well…”life.”
Fittingly, the show I viewed at the Museum of Contemporary Art annex in Little Tokyo was on the effects of ecstasy. One of the exhibits features a dozen psychedelic super-sized magic mushrooms and a blissed-out blue character patterned after Mickey Mouse, all crafted out of brightly painted plastic. MoCA’s curator, whilst giving a guided tour, explained the difficulty that museum staff had maintaining this particular exhibit.
“The kids will just hug and climb on top of the mushrooms,” he said, receiving the subdued bemusement of his artsy audience.
It seems quite clear to me that these children are simply following the suit of the current generation: my own. We're all seemingly on one massive, group trip in pursuit of an unattainable happiness, and nobody, it seems, is ready to let go for the inevitable come down.