Hollywood!

Saturday, July 27 - Los Angeles

Hollywood.

It gives me writer's block.

I trundled into town detached, as if traveling along the pilgrimage route to another tribe's holy city. Hollywood, the glamour capital of America, celebrityville, Hollywood, the cultural hearth of post literate western society, home of first name only celebrities. Hard as I try to be above it all, I came to Hollywood and gawked like rube.

I got into Los Angeles and called a cyberfriend, Dennis, who'd graciously volunteered to show me the cultural highlights of his city. We'd never laid eyes on one another so I tried to make myself more identifiable at the bus station.

"I'll be out front," I told him, "I'll be the one wearing a black shirt."

"This is L.A., dude. Everyone's wearing a black shirt."

This is the first thing I noticed about Los Angeles: everyone's trying to live up to the stereotype. Rockers in the street dressed completely like rockers—black shirts, shaggy hair, jeans ripped and safety-pinned together. Actors shamelessly mugged in ill-fitting superhero costumes along Hollywood Boulevard. Explosions of community murals and colorful street art and deco-funky buildings and Latino-flavored open air markets that lay out every hue of the Southwestern palette and vintage 30s cars cruising in mint condition and In-and-Out Burger joints and seedy freeway underpasses and puddly concrete reservoir basins from a hundred Hollywood car chase sequences. Every street corner and every camera shot passing view in Los Angeles is an amped up version of exactly what you expect it to be from TV shows, talk show hack jokes, Us Weekly photo spread, and pulp detective novels. City of Angels, City of Paparazis, City of Stars.

The thing is, all the hackneyed pop cultural references made me expect Los Angeles to be a heartless place where the final western progress of American society landed, chewed up culture, and spit out damaged people in search of quick bucks and transitory fame. But on cruising through the city with an instantaneous good friend, I got a wholly different impression. Instead of consuming culture and leaving behind a dry husk of glitter and profits, I found a community so hungry for culture that it was in a constant state of reinvention. Los Angeles is still a fresh college graduate, starting on a new life and maybe even looking for a friend.

Los Angeles, having tired of its reputation as a car-cruising wasteland, has reinvented itself as a mass transit friendly modern city with a state of the art subway system. But it doesn't look inexperienced or utilitarian as you'd expect a new subway system to appear. When LA built its subway, it erected a series of user friendly, aesthetically pleasing, and artistically impressive stations train stations up and down the cultural highlights of the city. From the film noir Modern eloquence of Union Station to the Forbidden Palace arches of Chinatown's station to the retrotech homage of the station that fed us into Hollywood and Vine, the subways were roomy without being cavernous and efficient without being rushed. They were artistic, urban, and clean.

Dennis took real pride in his city, chauffeuring me about through a busy street market full of quick tacos and gaudy souvenirs, past a street festival with Mexican folk dancers regaling a crowd, up and down Hollywood Boulevard as we laughed and pointed at each brass plated movie star's name we recognized, each name a mini shrine to yet another minor saint in the American religion of show biz, each side shop a treasure trove of false relics revering our faith in glamour and fame. Americans grow up expecting to be famous, expecting to be stars one day, just as Medieval serfs grew up in their manorial fiefdoms expecting to go to Heaven once they died. Stardom is our cultural birthright and our salvation. Los Angeles, our Rome, has simply made a working business out of proselytizing this faith; it is as efficient as the Vatican and just as pure in its motives. Hollywood gift shops are simply how we revel in this American faith in show biz: Three Stooges tee shirts, Humphrey Bogart shot glasses, Marilyn Monroe coffee mugs, snow globes incongruously trapping the Hollywoodland sign in the swirl of a violent blizzard. It's only unseemly if you're one of those pagans who don't like summer blockbusters.

A drag queen dressed like Cyd Charisse sashayed onto the subway, nonchalantly gazing about for admirers. Kids rented long stretch limos and cruised up and down the Walk of Fame like movie stars. I only know they were kids because I craned my neck down to look in and see if there was anyone famous in there. Nope, just kids. Musicians walked along swiftly in dark shades as if to avoid their imaginary fans. Ludicrous middle aged businessmen paraded their trophy wives past Grauman's Chinese. Paparazzi set up cameras on tripods in front of the Grauman's, waiting for celebrities who never arrived. Dennis never gets tired of it. The people here live in the art of constant reinvention.

Dennis has worked as a navy seaman, a financial analyst, a noodle chef, a commodities broker. He's tried out for movie parts. Now he's a truck driver. He's reinventing himself, too. It's what people do here. It's what people can do here. It's the land of reinvention. People just become what they want to be. They might spread our culture around, but they don't let the past hold them back. Four hours in the man's company and I feel like I have a lifelong buddy. Perhaps we just wanted that; perhaps we just invented that idea.

It might be L.A., but I really wouldn't call it la-la.