I bet I would have to deal with all kinds of racist horseshit birther nonsense.

And no, there is no specific reason why I bring up this point at this particular moment.  No reason at all.  Nope.

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Joe Wilson is a cracka-ass cracker.  And this from a commentator compared (by Esquire, natch) to parsley.

Kanye West is a jackass.  And this from the President of the free world.  And that is no lie. 

Oh, and it turns out that there are some crazy, crazy people in grad school.  (though maybe not as crazy as whoever wrote the code for that http address).

All things I could have told you, without disrupting a major policy speech, or causing a fete stupide typique du media, or, well, let’s just say I have some experience with grad-school crazy people.

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I have students that send me YouTube links to Belgian performance art. 

Gawd I love this town.

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“I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entire what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South.  To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always had an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is a just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live.  But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city.  It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.  To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.”

I have never wanted to live in Los Angeles.  Not Hollywood, nor Westwood.  Not Malibu, Rancho Palos Verdes, Silver Lake, nor Santa Monica.  Nor, and this most especially, in the further reaches of the urban metastasis that laps at the oak-studded hillsides of Simi Valley, the poppy-carpeted bluffs above Laguna Niguel, the glittering sands of Palm Springs, the “American Riviera” of Santa Barbara.

In this want of desire, I am, it would appear, a freak.  I am an insufficiently socialized child of the 20th century.  I am a heretic in the house of Mammon. 

There are, generally speaking, two attitudes towards and of LA, two varieties of sin which the city incorporates, reproduces, and mythologizes.  Every city has its own sin, I suppose – New York is paradigmatic for being the epicenter of greed.  Most Southern cities espouse some form of wrath.  Sacramento, to the extent that it is sinful at all, evinces a peculiar form of pride.  Las Vegas supposedly embodies lust, though in fact it embodies gluttony.  Honolulu, at least in the minds of those of us who live on the mainland, represents sloth.  LA is in the peculiar position of representing two: envy, and greed. 

These two sins are closely related, to be sure.  But they are conceptually distinct.  Greed, which it say covetousness, is the desire to possess, the wanting of what one does not have.  It is essentially selfish in the sense that it is entirely self-referential.  People who are greedy possess nothing so much as a gaping maw of need, a bottomless pit whose sides are shored up by the pitiless architecture of capitalism, itself an economic system whose very engine runs on the energy expended by the acquisition and disposal of all those things – money, goods, friends, or fame – which we who are greedy continually fling as sacrifice into the pit. 

Envy is something else.  Envy is what you feel when someone else has something you don’t.  More specifically, it is what you feel when someone else has something which you feel, rightly or wrongly, ought to belong to you.  Envy is externalized, oriented toward others.  It is, in this way, different from jealousy: one envies one’s neighbor’s possessions, whereas one is jealous of one’s own wife.  One envies the beauty of others, their talents, their possessions and positions.  But one is jealous of one’s own face, salary, and status.  Thus gated communities.  Thus plastic surgery.  Thus copyright law.  Envy appears in our regard toward those who possess the rewards we did not ourselves receive, and we envy them even when they deserve those rewards.  Envy is the green poison that flowers from promises fulfilled for others.  It is the sour taste of failure, the gall of unrewarded work.  It is the bitter water drunk from the bottom of the well. 

I appreciate the aesthetics of the envy.  I understand the attractions of a mythology that explains without reconciling how envy leads directly and ineluctably toward violence and spiritual degradation.  I understood it even before I lived in Texas.  And I especially appreciate these aesthetics as they are filtered through the all-too-familiar Los Angeles of the noirs, of Chinatown and LA Confidential, of Salton Sea and the Big Lebowski, of Chandler and Cain.  What is a noir, after all, but the story of a good man walking down mean streets, wrestling with the darker angels of our urban landscape, repairing as best he can all that has been put out of joint through the work of envy?  But being an aspiring connoisseur I like these aesthetics somewhat less in their more rawly-prepared versions: the disaster films, the “breaking story!”-segments on the news regarding O.J. Simpson, abducted children, and riots.  I find barely tolerable the recent ghouls’ orgy of coverage after Michael Jackson’s overdose on prescription narcotics.

The aesthetics of greed, on the other hand, generally leave me cold.  Of all the seven deadlys, acquisitiveness, auri para fames, is not my particular sin.  Unlike Da Spouse, I cannot sit rapt for hours watching HGTV.  The Real Housewives of Orange County bores me even as a concept.  If I want to indulge my appetite, I prefer to consume all that the good life in America has to offer for real and not as a simulacrum. 

Perhaps that says something about my relative level of class privilege.  I’m not sure, though.  I’ve never noticed any apparent correlation between real-life deprivation and a predilection for the pornography of excess.  Some of my best friends — who will remain nameless, but you know who you are, raised in the leafy edenic bowers of East Sacramento – love love loves them The Apprentice. 

Maybe it says something about familial culture.  Of values transmitted and retained.  Maybe it says something about my grandmother, and a strength of character I have only recently really come to appreciate. 

 
The LA I don’t know.

All of us have relatives in LA, I suppose.  At the very least, all of us with access to a television, radio, or computer have at least some minimal familiarity with contemporary popular culture.  Hell, some of us apparently absorb it osmotically from the pages of Us Weekly while pacing through the checkout line at the supermarket.  But in any case all of us, whether we admit it or not, think that we know LA. 

We don’t.  It is impossible to know LA.  As Da Spouse once put it, in a not-inapt metaphor, LA is like a wave too big to take in all at once.  You just have to let it wash over you and see whence you are carried. 

On my most recent trip to LA, I stayed at the Westin Bonaventure downtown.  This is an LA I most definitely do not know.  I have been coming to LA at least once a year every year since I was a child, and I had never been to the intersection of Sixth and Flower (“why would you have?” asked Da Partner, “it’s not like there’s anything to do.”  True, but somewhat beside the point.  There’s nothing to do in Irvine, either.  Not really.  And yet I’ve been there plenty of times, to the point where I can recommend at least two hotels).  Japantown, yes – to see a Murakami exhibit at the Contemporary Art Museum.  Olvera Street, yes – twice when on a lark I took the train.  But downtown?  No. 

The Bonaventure, for those of you who have not had the pleasure, is the best remnant 70s glitz on the market.  It is…a sight to behold.  It was built at a time when it was still possible to make structures out of poured concrete and that somehow connoted “the future.”  A time when glass elevators and fountains and revolving restaurants on the 32nd floor were worth paying extra for.  When martinis were out of fashion the first time, and long before people thought of putting anything other than vermouth in them.  When Japanese restaurants served teriyaki steak, and no one served California fusion. 

This, this is the quintessence of Gordon Gecko late-20th century greed.  It is, needless to say, the hotel of choice for labor union conventions.  Which is why I was there. 

I would not recommend this hotel, expect perhaps if you need a place to take your mistress. 

Another LA I don’t know: on a less-recent trip, Da Spouse and I met two of his work-colleagues at a bar in Old Town Pasadena.  One of these colleagues is from Eagle Rock and went to Yale – and so perhaps in another place or time, Boston say, or New York, we would have bonded immediately as fellow double-expats, Californians in the East and smart kids from inner-city schools who won the meritocracy lottery and made it to the Ivy League (or in my case, the “Ivy+”).  But at that time, in that place, there was the kind of guarded distance produced by relevant otherness, by the purely California idiocy that means that a Hispanic woman and an Anglo male have nothing that is not always, already problematic to say to one another. 

Instead I spoke with Da Spouse’s other colleague.  A nice young white guy from the provinces – upstate New York – who clearly had come to see the glittering, glamorous city of dreams.  Who had come to see the Huntington Library and the Getty Center and instead spent his time drinking Pacifico in the basement dance floor of a bar on Colorado Boulevard.  I do not remember what we talked about on that particular occasion.  I was too distracted by the show going on about us.  Not only was there a dj scratching at a turntable tracks from artists I had never even heard of (but whose lyrics were reminiscent of L’il Kim at her most sailorish), there was a real-time silhouette of an obviously, and I mean obviously, naked woman pole-dancing against a background of psychedelically-shifting colors.  There were amply-endowed women (trunk and hood, we being among the few Anglos in the place) dirty-dancing with the kind of men who wear knee-length watch chains and had tears tattoed to their cheekbones.  This was an LA of flaunted breasts, of invited envy.  Of recorded violence in the service of protection and possession.

I have been to gay bars on two continents, to clubs where the floors are sticky and the bathrooms dark and air is fairly foul with the stench of amyl nitrate.  Where the patrons are drunk and high and where the question of serostatus is indelicate, omnipresent, and always assumed.  And I have only once been to a place where I was more thoroughly aware of an atmosphere of sin as I was on that particular evening.*  This is not an LA I knew then, or even now. 

Or yet again: the next day we picked up these same two colleagues at a house in Echo Park.  It was a chopped-up Craftsman duplex, and stood on a winding street, on the kind of steeply-banked hill that does not appear in the Valley at all, but is indicative of a certain era of neighborhood in both the East Bay and the nearer-in streetcar suburbs of Los Angeles.  Were we of such a mind, we could have pitched pennies from the back windows of that house onto the wide dome of the Angelus Temple, which stood at the foot of the bluff below.  I did not linger on the thought of what it might feel like to be in that house in an earthquake.  Or for that matter, in a strong rain. 

From there we drove to brunch.  Now normally when I visit a city, I look for the kind of place where the patrons or the owners (or both) appear at first blush to have sympathetic politics.  Typically such establishments are not hard to find, but they are limited in number.  In LA they are more difficult to find, but only because there are for all practical purposes unlimited in quantity.  In our search for such a place we drove through whole stretches so dense with commercial activity that Da Spouse was moved to remark upon their similarity to Mexico City and Hong Kong.  I do not particularly recall the specifics of the place we went to on that particular occasion; what struck me instead was this LA was one of several, hell it was one of several dozen, the intimate knowledge of which was beyond me.  The existence of so many specific, particular neighborhoods, of commercial strips and ethnic conclaves, of development and redevelopment and infill and adaptive reuse?  How could one ever really know, except in theory, the restless juggernaut of entrepreneurial spirit that is, in fact, capitalism at its best?  Not only do I not know this LA, I never could know it – it is ever-changing, ever-expanding.  It is the scintillating face of the beast itself, crowned and victorious, marching inexorably toward Armageddon.

I do not know this particular LA.

The LA I do know.

My LA, the LA that I know from the several hundred Saturdays spent at the Marie Callender’s in Monrovia, or at my aunt and uncle’s house high up in the canyon above Sierra Madre, or playing pool at my grandparents’ former house in Arcadia, or marveling at the wall of dire wolf bones at the La Brea Tar Pits before walking (!) up to Fairfax for lunch, is someplace else.  It is not an Estoril.  It is not a Utopia.  It is not a VH1 special. 

The LA I know consists of sitting on a felt-covered folding chair, under a great canvas tent in the middle of a near-treeless expanse of the southwestern corner of Live Oak Memorial Park in Monrovia. 

The LA I know consists of listening to my grandmother’s ex-sister-in-law eulogize her dead brother when it’s 95 degrees, accompanied by a carefully chosen selection of old-time gospel tunes. 

The LA I know consists of listening to my ex-step-great-aunt say, with a pitch-perfect lack of irony, “Dude loved Dick.”

Didion had something to say, I think, about the kind of person that did not know their great-aunts.  I have always experienced a kind of astigmatism when reading these particular passages; her comments are clearly meant for someone like me, and yet I have known several great-aunts. 

“Dude,” just so’s we’re all clear, was the familial nickname for my ex-step-grandfather.  The Pentecostal butcher.  Husband #2.  Dick was his favorite horse.  A sway-backed cuss of a gelding that was apparently a bitch and a half to break. 

When Dude and his umpteen siblings moved to California in 1958, his youngest sister – the eulogist at his wedding – was two years ahead of my mother in high school.  Is it any wonder that my grandmother was annoyed to learn that her second husband had lied about his age when he courted her?

The LA I know consists of precisely such stories.  Stories where a Minnesotan Pentecostal farm boy moves to LA, marries a big-busted woman 4 years older than himself, and discovers that not only does she like to dance, she likes to drink. 

The LA I know consists of the lessons that come into play when such stories run off the rails.  Such as the lesson my grandmother imparted to me on my most recent visit: men who drink shouldn’t gamble, and men who don’t know how to gamble shouldn’t drink, and men who don’t know how to gamble and can’t hold their liquor have no business spending time in Las Vegas.  Or at Santa Anita, which is just down the street from where we planted my ex-step-grandfather.

Did I mention that my family bought the cabin in Tahoe after my grandmother divorced the Pentecostal butcher?  It is… a footnote to the arc of this story.  A footnote to that footnote would be that when she finally got to stop paying him alimony after the divorce, she sold the house they had lived in together for 25 years and lifted the note on the Tahoe place.

I’m sorry, I appear to have lost sight of the arc of this tale.  Where was I?

Ah, yes.  Sitting in a felt-covered folding chair, under a tent, in the 95 degree heat, in Monrovia, in Live Oak cemetery. 

However could my attention have wandered?

Perhaps it was the moment when I realized that there were only three people present at this funeral who were not related to the deceased by birth, marriage, or divorce:

1.) Da Spouse, whose marriage to the former step-grandson of the deceased had recently been called into question by the electorate of California,
2.) A woman we shall call “Dora” (short for “Auxiliadora”), the former in-home supportive care aid to my ex-step-grandfather, and
3.) Some guy whose name I never quite caught, but who apparently used to work with, or was a running buddy of, or in any case was the closest thing to a friend of my ex-step-grandfather to show up at his funeral. 

My attention certainly wandered during the exchange between my uncle (#4 son, the organizer of the day’s events) and “some guy” to the effect of:

Mon Oncle: “Yeah, I’m real glad we got this spot for my dad.  It was the only spot in this area of the cemetery that had a tree.  I know my dad will appreciate the shade on a day like today.”

Some Guy: “Yeah, he’ll need the shade where he is.”

….

My attention most certainly did not wander during the exchange between my ex-great-aunt and “Dora”:

Ex-Great-Aunt: Tell us, Dora, the story about Dude and the socks.

“Dora”: I no speak English so well to tell this story.

Ex-Great-Aunt: Well, okay.  So “Dora” was folding Dude’s socks one day, and Dude rolls over in his wheelchair to watch her.  After a minute of watching her diligently fold his socks, he says, “Dora, why are you folding my socks?”  And “Dora” says, “because, Mr. [Dude], that way you will always have a pair together, yes?”  To which Dude says, “But Dora, I only have one leg!”

General laughter followed this story.  My ex-step-grandfather had lost the use of legs, you see.  To alcohol-aggravated adult-onset diabetes. 

In case you are wondering, my ex-step-grandfather died of liver cancer.

The LA I know is a place where such gallows humor is not merely allowed, but for which the ground-work is as carefully laid as any stand-up routine.

But there was one final moment, it must be said, at which my attention did not wander.  It was the moment when my ex-great-aunt told the following story:

“One day Dude came to visit cousin [blank.  I did not catch the name.  It was someone on the Minnesota in-law side] in the nursing home.  And we had such a nice visit.  We laughed and laughed, and told stories about the old days.  And just as we were getting to the end of our visit, Dude did the sweetest thing I have ever seen.  He sang this song.  This song right here [indicating the boom box which her grandson was fumblingly cuing up.  After an awkward moment we were treated to Merle Haggard crooning “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”].  He sang it all the way through without a hitch.  And you know what a sweet tenor Dude had.  I couldn’t believe he remembered all the words.  Cousin [blank] had tears in her eyes when he finished.  And she passed on to her reward just a few days later.  I know she’s up there now with open arms, just waiting for Dude.”

Leaving aside for a moment the utter improbability of this saccharine morality tale – for I’m sure it was true “in a sense,” it was true “for her” (my ex-great-aunt), and so therefore true in “all the ways that mattered” or some other fantastically evangelical solipsism – leaving aside, in other words, the plain cold fact that the story can never be refuted (there were only three people in that room, of whom two are now dead), there is the hard kernel of envy to her narrative.  The utter conviction that her brother, her dear sweet fallen brother, the one who walked away from the Church of the Four-Square Gospel (Aimee Semple McPherson’s own, whose mother institution is the Angelus Temple, right there in Echo Park) and never looked back, the one who married a divorcée who smoked and drank and danced and gambled and otherwise lived her life with the utterly blasphemous conviction that if other people had theirs and she didn’t, well bully for them, the brother who spent every spare dime he had in Las Vegas and Santa Anita, that brother?  That brother must have, must have, gone to heaven. 

And never mind that the ex-wife and the two living step-kids, plus their assorted progeny, together accounted for more than half the people present.  Never mind that only one of Dude’s six living natural-born siblings made it to the funeral.  Never mind that the only friend he had in the world who bothered to show up at his funeral openly speculated that he was now in the hot place. 

Never mind all that.  Because if being a member of the true church means anything, it means that when you get to heaven you get all the goodies.  You get the big house in the West Hills, because He has many, many mansions for his faithful.  You get the Cadillac Escalade.  You get the double-mocha latte with the whipped cream.  You get health care magically provided to you, free of all taxes (Somebody Else, after all, has already paid for it).  You get the endless party at the end of time, and the only people there are people like you.  And that includes your dear sweet fallen brother. 

This is the LA I know.  Where envy has been decanted to such a sweet intoxicating brew that you can hardly smell the whiff of meanness. 
*This was at a bar called “The Saint.”  It is attached to a bathhouse in Providence, RI.  It was not my idea to patronize this establishment.  When one of the servers came out attired only in a gold-lame thong and ostrich-feathers (Eyes Wide Shut had only recently come out) and made it clear that he was available for rental, I suggested to my companion that we leave.  We did.  Who knew that one could find lust in old New England?

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