It's raining on Sunset Boulevard and Snoop Dogg's face looms over the street and traffic below....stoned, enigmatic, genius...from a billboard promoting his new single "Drop it like it's Hot."
You duck under the canopy of the Standard Hotel and step past the gas station attendent clad valets and into its 2001 A Space Odyssey lobby where you are greeted by two diligent front desk clerks, clad in all white and each with dark, gelled hair.
Behind them, in a glass box mounted into the wall above the front desk lies a young woman. She, too, is dressed in all white: hot pants and a tank top.
She's reading a magazine. A cell phone lies beside her pillow. She's at eye level, she's behind glass, and she is quite obviously bored...
There are so many different LA's.
There's the one Joan Didion chronicled in her collection of essays, the White Album. There's the Los Angeles of Mike Davis' City of Quartz. Or Nathanial West's Day of the Locust....or the LA of Bruce Wagner's brilliant series of novels. There's the LA of music: from Snoop Dogg, Beck and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Bernard Herrman, Hoagy Carmichael and Peggy Lee. And then there's the LA of movies...Chinatown, Sunset Boulevard, LA Confidential, Repo Man, and Boogie Nights.
Through it all runs what a friend told me, exasperated, in the back of the non-VIP section of a swank bar: "Nobody here is just what they are, everybody's trying to be somebody, or something, else."
And you know it. From the John Cusack look-alike bartender at the Chateau Marmont who's got a screenplay cooking that will land him an agent and a deal....not to speak of membership in the Screenwriter's guild...to the jaded staff at the bookstore down the block for whom reality and time stand still in between auditions....so still they cannot seem to help you find a book.
Meanwhile, they're still putting up new billboards on Sunset...and it takes awhile to understand why a city so inundated with images and advertisements would need more...until you realize that for so many Angelenos, the next person on that billboard could be them. Their movie, their musical act, their client might be the next face dominating the skyline and the streets.
Only in LA would the Mondrian Hotel build two huge bronze doors facing Sunset Boulevard...three stories high...mostly blocking the view of their entrance...except for a gap from which you can peep at the absolutely beautiful, and the fake, as they depart their luxury cars to make their way to Sky Bar and the hotel restaurant. A sublime, if not obnoxious, if not, on some level, aspirationally egalitarian, statement of exclusivity.
Only in LA...a city to which so much of the world's entertainment dollars point...like the invisible grid of a cultural superhighway system that covers the globe...and extends the reach of LA farther than most imagine....can you routinely drive and valet park your car to eat dinner in a restaurant, by yourself, with a book on your table that you are unable to read...because the "nightclub" atmosphere of the decor prohibits lights bright enough to distinguish text....even the menu.
And yet the routine insults hurled at LA fall short of the mark...yes, it's all true...but that doesn't get to the heart of the matter.
LA is alive in a way that points up truths about the reality of life here in the media age. Celebrity, wealth, glam superficiality, and hype are all distractions from the immense amount of work that LA represents...the fact that it is one of the premier manufacturing cities on the planet...the fact that it represents the ethnic future of that planet...the fact that most of the cultural workers in LA do their jobs remarkably well, including those in the support infrastructure of the entertainment industry...
and the reality that LA at night is like a factory of cool. A grid that turns on...and never stops. Hungry for talent, for history, for information, for breakout artists. Louche, undisciplined...but always with enough room for the irreverant, the non-linear to have a chance to turn over the corporate dreck that the accountants and producers have propped up during the day.
Los Angeles is an experiment. More than most any other city. It is a test tube. A roll of the dice. Do not underestimate its intelligence, its resilience and might....don't take it too seriously.
Someday you might leave a movie theater, or set down your iPod...moved, perplexed or thrilled beyond words...at the work of one of those mysterious players caught up now in the game of metamorphosing into someone else.