The dream of pure salt; the air of drifting orange. Much has been written about LA: usually derogatory. Who, in their right mind, would like to be in a place where the smell of burnt rubber invalidates all others?
This is how I saw it, more than a decade ago, when the call of grad school brought my SO and me to the city that isn’t a city, to the place where the blanching sun desiccates the air in your lungs. The desert knocks on its door; but we lived on the westside. Protected by the breeze, exposed to the 405.
Our first year in LA, we didn’t have a car. We couldn’t visit with my sister and my brother-in-law, unless they came to see us. We felt isolated, but, most of all, we felt lost: how do you go into the store, we kept asking? All stores have doors to the street, but they don’t open. Sometimes, a notice directs you to another door. All stores are accessed from the parking lot. We got that, once we bought a car. This is how we understood that LA is a car city. But, now we love even that!
We miss having a reason to drive 30 min east to eat the best taco in town, or to see one of the best art shows we’d ever seen. Our LA has always been West LA: quintessentially non-walkable LA! But greener and more musical: for 7 years we lived very close to the 405; in the 8th year we moved away, and I couldn’t sleep for months. The white noise I was so familiar with was no more…
We went to LA twice since we moved away to the Midwest. Each time we went back, I was apprehensive: will I still love my city, or will I be disappointed by it, seeing it with fresh eyes? Will its ugliness be overwhelming? These proved to be ill-formed questions: LA is, more than anything, a state of being, not a city, in the usual sense of the word. This state of being hasn’t left me even though I left the city.
You learn to quickly love the sun. First, it’s in your eyes; but soon, you discover that it’s in your mouth, and lungs, and belly, too. Can you ever do serious work, with the beach so close? Well, we are not beach people: we used it mostly for jogging, and rarely. The sun is overpoweringly sunny mostly in the mountains: when you go hiking, you love that there are no insects, but the sun is buzzing in your brain almost as loudly as mosquitoes, cicadas, and ot
her pests do in the Midwest. But you cannot ever think of the sun as a pest: you are in the desert, and its joyful radiance will grow on you quickly. There are roads and water is easily available. Flowers are multicolored and fragrant year-round.
And the quality of the produce makes you easily forget how problematic the water system is. Yes, I have watched “Chinatown” — that’s the first Jack Nicholson movie I saw. Still, it’s so difficult to think of that when cherimoyas assault your senses and quickly leave you in need of the next fix!
This flavor-odor-golden infused state of being can and will work against you from time to time: you get used to the bleaching powers of the sun very quickly, and you forget its desire for destruction. You buy too easily into the myth of always being happy and of a sunny disposition, because the sun is always there. When depression and anxiety strike, as they always do in grad school, for most people, you discover that the sun burned your mood to a cinder. There is too much light all of a sudden; the heat only makes you dizzier and unfriendlier.
And, then, if you’re lucky, you discover a darker, more potent LA. It’s the LA of people who are trying desperately to breathe; it’s where people who are passionate about something can find their peers. It’s all the Ashtangis who get together to practice while helping each other, not to feel superior in their purity of practice. It’s all the coffee buffs who gather their beans, unground, from small, corner cafes, not the ones who waste their time on the game-turned-to art of people watching.
Part of the LA I love is portrayed in Sean Baker’s “Tangerine” (2015) — it’s the LA of faded strip malls, dusty, dirty roads, and dubious low-level life. It’s the lo fi version, captured on iPhones, not on blockbuster level equipment. It’s also the LA of Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” (1992) and Rian Johnson’s “Brick” (2005), which doesn’t even take place in LA! What these movies have in common is an anti-hipster take on the washed-up, orange, dark reality of LA. Everyone is familiar with NY’s gangsters and homeless people; almost no one feels close to the troubled people of LA. Their struggles don’t seem real; their “professionalism” is marred by the bitter-sweet comedy that usually accompanies their presentation. These three movies — and they are not alone — tell us that laughing and crying at the same time is what we’ve all been doing all our lives, without even being conscious of such a big emotional charge. It’s this bitter-sweet image of LA that I describe as a state of being; it’s why I still call LA “home” (and maybe always will).
In other places I inhabited, one of these two emotions — either the exuberance, or the sadness — was always foregrounded. Only LA can offer you both and let you know that you can hold them simultaneously in your psyche, without fear of disintegrating: the sun takes care of it!