After seeing
Shortbus last night, I had pangs for my old home city. Of course, John's movie is a sweet romance version of New York City--Woody Allen for the downtown crowd. On the way home last night, KCRW had the new director of LACMA, Michael Govan (a transplanted New Yorker himself, having previously run Dia) talking about how the cultural weight is shifting from New York to Los Angeles. His reasons: Los Angeles is the port city for the South and the East, it's still affordable, it is going to wind up richer and larger than New York and that it remains undefined-- saying "in many ways it's still the Wild West, in the best sense."
I couldn't agree more. As an artist/writer/whatnot- Los Angeles has been very kind to me. I live in a house with a yard. I have the time and opportunity to work on projects of my own design. More so, I think Los Angeles is a more interesting city than New York. Too much of New York culture has been turned into a theme park- many people go there not to create art, but rather live the artist's life, by which they mean some sort of Andy Warhol lifestyle that is no longer feasible in a city that has no free space and costs an arm and a leg. I wish more of my New York friends would move out to L.A.: The weather is great, the city is so fucking 21st C., being barely a place at all, but more a series of social, civic and aesthetic connections between one place and another--- it's a horizontal city. If New York is the melting pot, then Los Angeles is the Great Switchboard, an opportunistic transfer zone whose citizens trade identities rather than commodities.
But I've also given up on trying to sell people Los Angeles. It's image as a sterile land of plastic surgery and celebrity is actually its best defense. Out-of-towners assume as a matter of truth that Los Angeles has no soul or subculture and so that soul or subculture never has to worry about presenting a public face to the world. The radioactive mutant spirit of Los Angeles hides behind Brentwood homes and yoga classes. Stuff here actually feels fucking subversive. All of New York's subversion has been turned into commodity- that's what New York does now, it seems.
Don't get me wrong-- I love New York. It's a lovely city and the people are great, but it has nowehere to go. It's sort of complete, don't you think? It will only become more like itself in the future. L.A. is undefined and electric.
