No matter what you do in LA, your behavior is appropriate for the city. Los Angeles has no assumed correct mode of use. No one’s going to save you; no one’s looking out for you. It’s the only city I know where that’s the explicit premise of living there—that’s the deal you make when you move to LA. The city, ironically, is emotionally authentic. It says: no one loves you; you’re the least important person in the room; get over it. What matters is what you do there. The whole thing is ridiculous. It’s the most ridiculous city in the world — but everyone who lives there knows that. No one thinks that L.A. “works,” or that it’s well-designed, or that it’s perfectly functional, or even that it makes sense to have put it there in the first place; they just think it’s interesting. And they have fun there. In LA, you don’t have to be embarrassed by yourself. You’re not driven into a state of endless, vaguely militarized self-justification by your xenophobic neighbors. Los Angeles is where you confront the objective fact that you mean nothing; everything there somehow precedes you, and it’s bigger than you and more abstract than you and indifferent to you. You don’t matter. You’re free.
No comments:
Post a Comment