Los Angeles Love Letter
Your gift to us is the fact that you don’t really exist.
You’re not a brick and mortar place.
You therefore make all of us – no matter how solid our homes –
mere travelers with a temporary base.
Watch the tourists desperately trying to make sense of you, ending up with everything you are not. Your Hollywood Sign (residue of a failed real estate enterprise), the hands and footprints of forgotten stars gathering dust in front of old shoe and liqueur stores…
One could feel sorry for those tourists that are offered nothing more than cardboard cutouts. But then isn’t this what makes you unique, the fact that you never are what you are perceived to be? While your fixed identity is still settling in one area, new life is already gestating under your still fresh asphalt layers in another part of town, and soon there too the surface will crack under the weight of cranes – themselves symbols of incompletion, and cement trucks and construction crews sweeping the dust up in the air and on our cars’ hoods while waiting at traffic lights in the hot summer sun.
Where a scene on the East Coast would fix the town for years to come, here you have to shout very loudly and still then, you will only reach a fraction of the world that has made its home here. Go ahead, create your cool, hip, newest politically correct scene; one block over no ones knows or cares.
This is what creates your visceral democracy; you cannot be grasped; your name itself is a contradiction in terms. You are not one place; you are a collection of millions of impressions and states of mind.
You are then, a state of being. For the naïve visitor and would be conqueror, still arriving in droves by bus and air, you seem such an easy open target. Only after a while when the beginner’s luck runs out, you reveal that real success can only be built over time, with a clear intention set, inside the heart. You are a superb projection screen for everyone’s dream; be it the promising high school student who won high praise for her acting in the annual school play in a suburb of Oklahoma City, or the entrepreneurial Mexican crawling over and under fences, to get here, stubbornly refusing to let go of the possibility of the existence of an American Dream.
If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
I remember, when I arrived here, fresh off the plane from Europe, I kept searching for your center. You dazzled me, it felt like my jetlag never left, until you one day revealed yourself to me: You don’t care about centers; you grow neighborhoods and shopping malls, and fashion centers and theater rows, like weeds that tumble in the wind and build their home wherever they fall. Today Melrose Heights, and Robertson Boulevard, tomorrow new shopping centers for downtown and Dodgers Stadium, and luxury condos in Glendale, until, I’m confident, one day Boyle Heights or Crenshaw will be the center of Hip. Oh, excuse me? Construction has already started? Well, I am sorry but you just made my point.
Los Angeles, you are a micro cosmos of the entire planet; forget the melting pot; there is none; but what exists are hundreds of thousands of little pots and pans on the fire; their cooks borrow from each other; some spices here, some vegetables there; but it is all used to only further strengthen one’s own individuality. They could put a gate around you and declare you “Museum of the World” and all the rest of earth could disappear and we’d have a pretty good idea of what civilization on this planet was like.
Forever renewing, following your own heartbeat; today’s downfall of a certain neighborhood will inevitably be the foundation for rebirth in another area… let all the business go to the Westside and settle in Santa Monica, let weeds grow through the pavement in dusty downtown; the further the energy moves away from it, the closer it is again to its own new renaissance.
This unending flow of process and development creates your heartbeat. For you are not a fixed place; one of the best locations to realize this is the boardwalk at Venice Beach. Step beyond the street hawkers; the psychics, tarot card readers, and musicians; walk past the echoes of the drumbeat circle to the shoreline and if you listen really carefully, the waves will bring you the exotic sounds and mysterious scents of that other continent where Confucius taught that the most extreme moment of fixation heralds the coming of the new; and that therefore inevitably the state of seemingly utmost chaos and confusion emphasizes the foundation of a firm new structure.
Los Angeles, je t’embrace, for the way you force me permanently to let go of the old and embrace the adventure of new and unknown possibilities.
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