- Two tales, one thesis, loads of unusual sex and debauchery.
Written in January, 2006.
I. Entry Point
Los Angeles to me has always been a fascinatingly conflicted place. As the starting point for my exploration of this nation, I remember my first glimpse of the sprawling urban maelstrom from the window of our plane. I had just turned 15, for the second time in two days, thanks to the wonders of 15-hour time differences and 12-hour flights. The anniversary of my birth happens to coincide with that of the (non-Native) United States, and as a bratty teen unleashed upon the consumer frenzy that the Phil Knight’s of the world whirl up so successfully through ingenious marketing campaigns, I had my eyes set on one birthday gift only: A pair of brand spankin’ new Air Jordan XIVs, at the delightful price of $150, U.S. (Then, in the harrowing pre-boom days of Australian mini-recession: roughly $230).
So, after settling into our room at the Westin Bonaventure, I dragged my family out to find the nearest shoe store in which to procure a pair of these sweet, holy foot-sheaths of the hardwood, worn by none other than God reincarnate, Mr. Jordan.
We ventured away from the towering financial skyscrapers amongst which our hotel was located, into the (unbeknownst to us) far shadier regions of Downtown. Before long, hunger intervened, and we made a stop for lunch, at none other than America’s golden temple of greasy triumph: McDonalds (or “Mackey-Ds,” as Australian youth refer to it). For this gluttonous emperor of corporate standardization, the cultural distinctions—beyond the gastronomical (I’d take Aussie McDonalds any day)—were eye opening: I saw my first real homeless person take the unused ketchup packet from my bag and consume it, shot-style. Upon dashing out, I remember the foreign sense of shock I felt at the clear economic disparities which surrounded me: the unfortunate chap sitting on cardboard around the corner, the snooty disdain in which a well-to-do woman glanced around her. We’d traveled at most a couple of blocks, but the almost instantaneous drop-off in wealth was like a North Dakotans first trip to the beach; the reality of the Angeleno underclass like a brutal wave crashing over my welfare state-coddled mind.
That evening, in the bar at the revolving tower atop the Bonaventure, I sipped on the most expensive glass of Coca-cola in my life as fireworks exploded before us, capping what was at the time the most significant birthday of my life. And though I would later be rewarded with those mightily over-priced Jordans—only the beginning of a thankfully short-lived sneaker collecting habit (call it “Air Cocaine”)—Los Angeles would for me always be remembered as a place of fundamental inequity.
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II. The King's Fool
It seems counterintuitive, but I received some of my juiciest background on Los Angeles from a farm boy who grew up in the Midwest.
“They’ve seen the Valley. They’ve seen Beverly Hills. They’ve been through Hollywood and they think they know L.A.”
Daniel pauses briefly, his jet-black non-coiffed ‘hawk falling over dark eyebrows, thin arms crossed across the table.
“…So he puts a picture of a fucken’ dollar store and a tiny taco truck up on his blog! Cos that’s what most of this city is made up of. And that’s what I fucken’ love about it!”
But later on in the conversation, talking to a fellow L.A. transplant originally from Chicago, he expresses consternation over the future of his adopted city:
“But now Silverlake just equals Williamsburg equals Silverlake…” he calculated, referring to the newly gentrified yuppie havens of L.A. and New York respectively, decrying the rapid homogenization of what once was fresh, what once may have been—dare I utter the phrase? —cool. As one who has had his eye on Williamsburg since visiting its Mandela-quoting street art alleys and alluring Asian-American female inhabitants last year, I feigned similar ennui at the swiftly changing face of both neighborhoods.
“Goddamn hipsters,” I muttered under my breath, wondering whether I should feel the slightest bit sheepish for owning a Member’s Only jacket.
Raised on a farm in Iowa, one would never have guessed that Daniel’s tenure in this most starry of cities amounts to roughly two years. It might be the effortless way in which he wears those remarkably tight black jeans. Or perhaps it’s his preference for Japanese glam rock and musical outfits whose passage-length names suggest a Faulkner-esque indifference toward brevity. Just to rub it in a little, he’s a 23-year-old who drives a motorbike to his job in Beverly Hills and has cartoonist friends who “are paid two hundred thousand to sit around in their studio watching DVDs.” Daniel is also adept at slipping too-perfect anecdotes on L.A.’s colorful demography and personality into conversation, including personal tales I can see etched into the smoky air outside the front door of hundreds of its bars:
“You wouldn’t believe how many times people call me, trying to pitch me their script! And I don’t even have anything to do with the selection process!” he laments.
I felt even stupider. Earlier in the evening, I’d just babbled excitedly to him about my (fanciful) thoughts on writing a biopic screenplay about the revolutionary guerilla leader and current president of the world’s newest nation. This was just after he had explained his current position at Participant Productions, financiers of recent acclaimed gems including “Syriana,” “Good Night and Good Luck,” and “North Country.”
“Think ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ meets ‘Hotel Rwanda,’” I had told him.
Following this ridiculous faux pas, I thoughtfully decided to consign myself to actually speaking only when the conversation approached subject matter of personal semi-authority. As the topics of hard-left political theory, British views on Irony and the ethnic dynamics of neither Malaysia nor Australia arose; I was more or less silent for the remainder of the evening. I did, though (perhaps as partial result), get past the first level on Donkey Kong on one of the circa-’81 arcade games the bar carried.
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III. Drugs and Rock n Roll
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 appears, is ready to let go for the inevitable come down.
Monday, January 30, 2006
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
New Year, New York
-Solving equations beneath the silver ball
The timer on Channel 1 had dipped below three minutes, both bartenders were occupied fixing drinks for other patrons, and my small party and I were entirely, frighteningly champagne-less. Save the solemn resolutions for another day (or year), all this particular reveler wanted for New Year’s Eve was to bring in the new millennium’s seventh anniversary by downing a glass of cheap bubbly.
My fears, naturally, were unfounded. Well before the midnight buzzer and our shoddy verbal countdown, I was sipping on champagne, so much so that by the time the ball dropped, I was already practically through my glass. But how sweet that beverage was, consumed as it was in East Village, lower Manhattan, New York City, surely the most magnificent example of modern man’s accomplishments, on this, my 21st New Year’s.
Like many others, my conception of NYE in NYC has been heavily derived from the screen more so than any other medium. In particular, by a famous scene involving two hookers, a Vietnam vet in a wheelchair, and a mentally challenged moral compass named Forrest. That seedy bar, that glittering hat, the antiquated celebratory scenes on the little television in the corner…rarely has a scene so inherently unappealing become so utterly intoxicating. Oh, what I would have done to bring in childhood New Year’s Eves in the company of two rowdy, drugged-out prostitutes and an embittered cripple!
My second most memorable, slightly less virtualized televised New Year’s memory was the millennial festive-leviathan that took place for the onset of 2000. I remember jumping about in my living room around 10:00 am on the 1st, swept up and far more excited at the scenes of smooching tourists in NYC and its descending silver ball than I was for Australia’s own celebration. Not even the gorgeous concert of golden fireworks exploding off of the Harbour Bridge could dislodge the big Apple as the true apple of my eye as far as end of year parties go. And, six years on, after finally experiencing my own NYNYs, I am beginning to see much further into the city’s universal appeal.
New York City is many things to millions of people. “Pleasant,” however, is rarely one of them. NYC might be glamorous, haughty, bewildering, obnoxious, unruly, cultured, and in my case, more fascinating in its minutia than its traditional showpieces, but simply “pleasant” it cannot be. Annapolis, Maryland, with its quaint bay and British lolly stores; Auckland, New Zealand, quietly tucked away, her residents striding across uber-cleanly designed streets; even Krakow, Poland, with her Gothic cathedrals and femme fatale blondes. Such places I might possibly refer to as “pleasant.” But never New York.
And Samuel Johnson may have been correct when he lamented several centuries ago that: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
But surely he was only keeping the mantle warm for this town.
I see it as a matter of proportions. We humans spend the majority of our lives engaged in the mundane: eating cereal, reading headlines, paying rent, and so forth. And when we’re not doing that, we’re more often than not complaining to somebody else about the relative displeasure of such things:
"Blimey, my rice bubbles taste salty today…oh, so that’s not the sugar…Oh God, would ya look at the earthquake that hit Balochistan yesterday...what? Jemima didn’t pay for June!” and likewise.
With all this pent up boredom and ill will, and what with war, famine and penile enlargement spam mail appearing as impertinent to eradication as ever, it’s only natural that offered such a universal holiday, so many people wish to charge about the streets engaged in the most ridiculous of drunken shenanigans as possible.
Olympic games opening ceremonies? Eh…some don’t care for sports.
End to World War II? Bah…the few remaining SS generals were likely less than ecstatic.
New Year’s Eve? Surely even Osama and Eeyore and Morrissey uncorked a bottle at some point during the night.*
What makes New York City so perfect for the evening is its unrivalled existence as an entangled mass of multi-everything, combined with huge dollops of everything else. The holiday to be celebrated by everybody, set in the city which famously holds something from everybody, multiplied by the fact that every kind of person from every nation/culinary tradition/sweatshop manufacturer can be found there, and we encounter a socio-mathematical equation of such grand scope and intricacy that its solution must clearly only be attempted after at least a couple of shots, likely assisted by several wine bottle abacuses.
Included within this fantastical equation must be the following operators: the grit of the New York subway train seat; the way that the chisel-faced Indian man who runs the CVS off of Jamaica Boulevard has a Jamaica, Queens Jamaican accent, not just a regular Jamaican or Indian or…American, one.
The seismic variations and tribal demarcation of Manhattan girls versus Queens girls versus Brooklyn girls. And in particular, that delightful integer known as the vintage shirt wearing, pretentious art space-populating, hip hop-shaking indie-girls of Williamsburg. (It happens to be my favourite.)
Also factored in should be the singing of early 90s rock ballad classic, “Summer of 69”, at the top of my lungs in an empty Karaoke bar on the same street where the pioneers of punk once spat their holy saliva and legions of hangers-on faithfully followed, then encoring it as I walked to the subway with off-key versions of Whitney Houston and Snow numbers (remember that “Informer” joint? Oh yeah, I did go there) with only the hint of eyebrow reactions from street-wise urbanites.
Not to forget the way New Yorkers speak Mandarin in Chinatown, Italian in Little Italy and on this particular night, British English everywhere one goes.
Then divide this by the constant struggle to maintain mindfulness and peace under the steady over-stimulated bombardment of pedestrian traffic.
This, factored to the power of the individual wanderers’ unlimited freedom, the toleration of mass consumerism, and subtract one’s envy and abhorrence in equal amounts of the super id pretensions of the glitterati and business elite, derived one thousand times by the social impetus of New Year’s celebrations.
And you don’t really get anything now do you? Because, naturally, mathematicians of varying levels of metaphor could never hope to ‘solve’ the New York New Year’s phenomenon. Rather, one has to throw herself into the beastly bathing waters of the city’s over-crowded tub, and whilst slowly steaming in the conflicting flavors of this stew of humanity, must overlook her putrid, teeming ugliness only to find it outmatched by the hidden subtlety of humanity’s divine beauty.
Here’s to a brighter, more peaceful, more unified year than the last one.
----
*Ok ok, so non-drinkers and small children I exempt from this claim. Folks on the lunar calendar don’t count. I’m Chinese…I have veto power.
The timer on Channel 1 had dipped below three minutes, both bartenders were occupied fixing drinks for other patrons, and my small party and I were entirely, frighteningly champagne-less. Save the solemn resolutions for another day (or year), all this particular reveler wanted for New Year’s Eve was to bring in the new millennium’s seventh anniversary by downing a glass of cheap bubbly.
My fears, naturally, were unfounded. Well before the midnight buzzer and our shoddy verbal countdown, I was sipping on champagne, so much so that by the time the ball dropped, I was already practically through my glass. But how sweet that beverage was, consumed as it was in East Village, lower Manhattan, New York City, surely the most magnificent example of modern man’s accomplishments, on this, my 21st New Year’s.
Like many others, my conception of NYE in NYC has been heavily derived from the screen more so than any other medium. In particular, by a famous scene involving two hookers, a Vietnam vet in a wheelchair, and a mentally challenged moral compass named Forrest. That seedy bar, that glittering hat, the antiquated celebratory scenes on the little television in the corner…rarely has a scene so inherently unappealing become so utterly intoxicating. Oh, what I would have done to bring in childhood New Year’s Eves in the company of two rowdy, drugged-out prostitutes and an embittered cripple!
My second most memorable, slightly less virtualized televised New Year’s memory was the millennial festive-leviathan that took place for the onset of 2000. I remember jumping about in my living room around 10:00 am on the 1st, swept up and far more excited at the scenes of smooching tourists in NYC and its descending silver ball than I was for Australia’s own celebration. Not even the gorgeous concert of golden fireworks exploding off of the Harbour Bridge could dislodge the big Apple as the true apple of my eye as far as end of year parties go. And, six years on, after finally experiencing my own NYNYs, I am beginning to see much further into the city’s universal appeal.
New York City is many things to millions of people. “Pleasant,” however, is rarely one of them. NYC might be glamorous, haughty, bewildering, obnoxious, unruly, cultured, and in my case, more fascinating in its minutia than its traditional showpieces, but simply “pleasant” it cannot be. Annapolis, Maryland, with its quaint bay and British lolly stores; Auckland, New Zealand, quietly tucked away, her residents striding across uber-cleanly designed streets; even Krakow, Poland, with her Gothic cathedrals and femme fatale blondes. Such places I might possibly refer to as “pleasant.” But never New York.
And Samuel Johnson may have been correct when he lamented several centuries ago that: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
But surely he was only keeping the mantle warm for this town.
I see it as a matter of proportions. We humans spend the majority of our lives engaged in the mundane: eating cereal, reading headlines, paying rent, and so forth. And when we’re not doing that, we’re more often than not complaining to somebody else about the relative displeasure of such things:
"Blimey, my rice bubbles taste salty today…oh, so that’s not the sugar…Oh God, would ya look at the earthquake that hit Balochistan yesterday...what? Jemima didn’t pay for June!” and likewise.
With all this pent up boredom and ill will, and what with war, famine and penile enlargement spam mail appearing as impertinent to eradication as ever, it’s only natural that offered such a universal holiday, so many people wish to charge about the streets engaged in the most ridiculous of drunken shenanigans as possible.
Olympic games opening ceremonies? Eh…some don’t care for sports.
End to World War II? Bah…the few remaining SS generals were likely less than ecstatic.
New Year’s Eve? Surely even Osama and Eeyore and Morrissey uncorked a bottle at some point during the night.*
What makes New York City so perfect for the evening is its unrivalled existence as an entangled mass of multi-everything, combined with huge dollops of everything else. The holiday to be celebrated by everybody, set in the city which famously holds something from everybody, multiplied by the fact that every kind of person from every nation/culinary tradition/sweatshop manufacturer can be found there, and we encounter a socio-mathematical equation of such grand scope and intricacy that its solution must clearly only be attempted after at least a couple of shots, likely assisted by several wine bottle abacuses.
Included within this fantastical equation must be the following operators: the grit of the New York subway train seat; the way that the chisel-faced Indian man who runs the CVS off of Jamaica Boulevard has a Jamaica, Queens Jamaican accent, not just a regular Jamaican or Indian or…American, one.
The seismic variations and tribal demarcation of Manhattan girls versus Queens girls versus Brooklyn girls. And in particular, that delightful integer known as the vintage shirt wearing, pretentious art space-populating, hip hop-shaking indie-girls of Williamsburg. (It happens to be my favourite.)
Also factored in should be the singing of early 90s rock ballad classic, “Summer of 69”, at the top of my lungs in an empty Karaoke bar on the same street where the pioneers of punk once spat their holy saliva and legions of hangers-on faithfully followed, then encoring it as I walked to the subway with off-key versions of Whitney Houston and Snow numbers (remember that “Informer” joint? Oh yeah, I did go there) with only the hint of eyebrow reactions from street-wise urbanites.
Not to forget the way New Yorkers speak Mandarin in Chinatown, Italian in Little Italy and on this particular night, British English everywhere one goes.
Then divide this by the constant struggle to maintain mindfulness and peace under the steady over-stimulated bombardment of pedestrian traffic.
This, factored to the power of the individual wanderers’ unlimited freedom, the toleration of mass consumerism, and subtract one’s envy and abhorrence in equal amounts of the super id pretensions of the glitterati and business elite, derived one thousand times by the social impetus of New Year’s celebrations.
And you don’t really get anything now do you? Because, naturally, mathematicians of varying levels of metaphor could never hope to ‘solve’ the New York New Year’s phenomenon. Rather, one has to throw herself into the beastly bathing waters of the city’s over-crowded tub, and whilst slowly steaming in the conflicting flavors of this stew of humanity, must overlook her putrid, teeming ugliness only to find it outmatched by the hidden subtlety of humanity’s divine beauty.
Here’s to a brighter, more peaceful, more unified year than the last one.
----
*Ok ok, so non-drinkers and small children I exempt from this claim. Folks on the lunar calendar don’t count. I’m Chinese…I have veto power.
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