ASTRAL, ANGELIC

A herd of black and red and silver Teslas scatter across the intersection of Wilshire and Lucerne; the long lashes of palm leaves and a matte blue sky stretch above. The sun, as always, rests bright and benevolent on its vast, open backdrop. Some of the Teslas turn right, others turn left, others go straight. They disperse – swiftly, solemnly – in miraculous silence.

Los Angeles can’t control itself, Los Angeles abounds. It is a locus for more. Los Angeles swells. More money, more power, more influence, more beauty. It swells to inordinate levels and the sense of freedom and opportunity that accompanies it ruptures. Los Angeles ruptures into a dystopian utopia marked by compulsive, insatiable desire: the desire to consume, the desire to beautify oneself, the desire to succeed. This gluttony excretes greed, exploitation, arrogance, narcissism, and clout-chasing. Thus, this fertile oasis of opportunity spirals into a self-destructive desert addled by maladies of depression, homelessness, violence, and several other mental, cultural, and economic illnesses. But Los Angeles, unlike any other city, has a unique ability to forgive itself. Immediately and perpetually. Its economy boasts a $1+ trillion GDP (larger than Greece, Portugal, and Chile, combined), its arts and entertainment industry is the largest in the world, and the sublimity of its mountains, hills, palm trees, and ocean – all under an (damn near) eternal blue sky – is blissfully cinematic. Los Angeles is a spectacle, perpetually sinning but perpetually absolving itself.

Within the city of Los Angeles there are several countries. There is neither a cultural nor physical nucleus here. Unlike New York, which is constantly anthropomorphised and nicknamed and thought of as this shapeful force, LA indulges in its ex-centricity and shapelessness, pulled by a centrifugal force that spills out its fragments across the coast and into the desert. Downtown, often thought of as the center of a metropolitan area, is the opposite here, a repellent for any hopes of a physical core.





The vast, horizontal, ex-centric planning of LA yields a madcap feeling of freedom, autonomy, and curiosity. Buttressed by an arts and entertainment culture that delivers neighboring ideals of achievement and liberation, LA has remained (for the past century or so) an axis of opulence and opportunity. Here, everything is open and possible. The wide, unfastened energy – laced with infinite, high-speed desire – is unprecedented in America. In New York, there is robust desire but this desire is contained by the verticality and uprightness of the city. New York’s dreams are tethered by its architectural and infrastructural cohesion and compression. There is order in New York; there, desire flies up toward its monoliths. In Los Angeles, desire disperses out – aimlessly and endlessly – into the flat desert. 

The swelling of desire in LA is inflamed by its focus on the individual. Economically, much of the city is oriented toward the optics that Hollywood, content creation, and the media industries celebrate. Power derives from hotness and coolness. Hot, wet, shiny, glossy individualism. Community and history are shattered and dissolved. The pop of the cinema – the predominant form of media here up until the 21st century –  has given way to content. The iPhone camera is always on. The stage is set. Every outfit, every smile, every cocktail is in service of the iPhone lens.




In 1978, Michel Foucault presciently asserted the rise of human beings as “human capital” or “entrepreneurs of [themselves].” In the traditional entrepreneurial and business setting that dominated the 20th century, control came from bosses telling you what to do, how to best do it, and tyrannically ensuring you were doing what they told you to do correctly. Surveillance, discipline, and responsibility were externally enforced. With the rise of the individual and a society decidedly oriented toward achievement, success, and constant self-improvement, surveillance and supervision don’t need to come from any external figure anymore. They come from within. Individuals police themselves to meet their own expectations of economic productivity. We have assumed the responsibility that bosses and other figures like the state enforced throughout the 20th century. Such is the 21st century “neoliberal” modus operandi.

In Los Angeles, the influencer serves as the paradigm of the 2024 neoliberal subject. With the influencer, an individual’s entire life is constructed as a commercial campaign with unceasing vlogs, Get Ready with Me’s, What I Eat in a Day’s, Day in the Life’s, and other sorts of intended intimacy and authenticity that the influencer is paid for in a variety of ways (views, product promotion, etc). Actions, emotions, and interactions are filtered through the lens of audience engagement, brand partnerships, and potential virality. Thus, work, leisure, family, and personal life all become vehicles (whether consciously or not) for capital gain. In this state, the human being is fully consumed by the market. Homo sapiens ruptures into homo economicus.

Hieroglyphics branded on Beverly Hills baby mama. The heraldry is cloaked in Praying Brangelina hoodies. The lungs are coated in irony and Blue Razz Ice propylene glycol. The eyes are obese. Legs masticate Kendall Jenner menstrual blood and knees like iron erase woes and debts. Tongues laugh and brows violate the sincere. Hands can’t hear the end of it all. The sound of Heaven afflicts everyone. It smells like piss everywhere. Bryce Hall is the last man alive. Give him the key to the city and let the ichor flow like wine.

A homo economicus looks much different than a homo sapiens, especially in Los Angeles. In a city where looks and appearance hold monetary promise, the pervasive desire for more floods the city with compulsive vanity. LA is the global jumbotron for aberrant cosmetics: ventriloquistic plastic surgeries, fatal anorexia, grotesquely swollen musclebodies, neurotic hygiene, necrotic tans. Bodies here lose all their graceful, imperfect seduction in favor of extremity and attempted “perfection,” becoming monuments of the perverse and the pathological. The natural beauty of mortality is suppressed. The body becomes pornographic: a massive sexual organ that is to be exhibited and consumed and desired for qualities that are deemed superior: largeness, petiteness, smoothness, symmetry. Go to the Venice boardwalk and you will see the cradle of our neo-civilization in all its lurid glory.

The culture of excess in LA, as seen in the obsessive surveillance and attempted idealism of the body, reflects the distortion of a healthy ambition for economic and social advancement growing into something much more sinister. In all facets of life and industry, things accelerate here. And not a New York acceleration. New York acceleration is circulation. New Yorkers move through interconnected, dependent vessels. They go places to deliver information and resources. Los Angeles races into the hollow and endless. The void is exhilarating but fatal. It can reward you with prosperity and recognition but punish you with Mid-Century homes full of too many mirrors and hickory cabinets full of capsulated decadence.




Despite my polemic tone so far, I have developed a deep love for Los Angeles. I love Los Angeles for its complicated nature. Its messiness. Los Angeles, for those of us here, as well as for the world at large, is much less of a place than it is a spectacle. It is theater.

The theater of Los Angeles absolves itself of its sins and saves us from sterility. It rescues us from the mechanical and numbingly habitual, from this hell of the same. In his 1989 work Amerique, Jean Baudrillard described Los Angeles as “utopia achieved.” The resounding notes of the environment, an exhilarating, media-saturated economy, and a culture of vanguards hum something sirenic. The city is a set full of special effects with automotive spaceships, ornate costume designs, and an eccentric, dynamic cast drifting through and reveling in our own malleable plot.

The relationship between the private and public sphere has changed dramatically over the past three centuries. Public engagements in the 18th century were often a stage: bodies were adorned in costumes and wigs, replete with signs and symbols. Women’s pouf’s represented anything from historical events to different emotions while their faces were decorated with beauty spots that indicated traits like roguishness and pride. The topology of this public life was shaped by allegory and visual narratives. The tenor of 19th century and 20th century public life coincided with the cadence of economic developments. Work supplanted play and thus uniform displaced costume. The shared fiction and mystery of the exterior died and the seriousness of labor hollowed out the public arena into a stadium of interiority and production.

Los Angeles is filled with play. And the sprawling landscape of LA is the perfect playground. When the playfulness of Los Angeles is not being abused as decadence and hedonism, it is a potent antidote to the monotony of a tired, rote world. People dress up to go to the supermarket or a bar. There is a shared, communal understanding that life is fun and whimsical. Aesthetic preoccupation has become ritualized sport, a communal festivity. People here perceive the contours of things. There is no math. Shape, color, and light find themselves in all facets of life. Public establishments indulge in a variety of cultural themes. Although these are commodified spaces, they are uplifting and aim to fill the soul with wonderment.

The architecture all around is an eclectic wonder. There is something brilliant about a Spanish Revival colonial home sitting next to a Mid-Century Modern one underneath a string of a dozen palms and a blue sky. For some reason, I can’t tire of a blue sky and palm trees. Raf Simons told Frank Ocean his obsession with cars was cliché. Frank said it’s probably linked to a “deep subconscious straight boy fantasy.” One of the pictures I took (seen below) captures Collin’s shadowed face with a blue sky and palms behind it. When I showed it to a friend they said it had a “woo, yeah, spring break!!” vibe to it. They didn’t like it. I love it. I link my obsession with palm trees and a blue sky to some deep subconscious East Coast boy fantasy of Southern California for a kid who grew up watching Hannah Montana, Zoey 101, and other shows (as well as movies) where these motifs are always present. I can’t break it. And I don’t think I want to. I think a part of me remains enchanted by it because it enables the ideal to endure. Every time I look up it doesn’t actually feel like a part of reality. I am submerged into that 2004 dream in front of a small CRT television. Oftentimes the dream tastes better than the truth. There, I rest.



 

Despite its unparalleled climate, architecture, natural beauty, and social environment, Los Angeles has become a profoundly digital and simulated society. The vast digitalization of LA and the bodies and lifestyles of the algorithm that we masticate and consume is the leading cause of our collective delirium. The premise of social media was that it was a social platform intended to connect humans throughout the world. Sociality is a fundamental characteristic of our species that should not only be advocated but legislated. There are (and should be) public space regulations that ensure the availability of parks, plazas, and other physically communal spaces. Social media, however, has severely deviated from its original communing nature and has become an atomizing force. As our digital identities grow, our physical identities begin to erode as we become more and more spectral: mute, pale, lone, haunting forms. In Los Angeles, there are striking differences between individuals’ IRL self  and the hyper-curated swamps of media iconography that they show online. If you walk down the street and talk to one of those chronically online persons who claims “main character” energy you will see the vacuum in their eyes. These are not real people. They are not here. They are calculating, curating, selecting;  despoiled by the digital occult, depleted of the rapture of seeing little cities of rocks on a dirt road or smelling the ecstatic violence of an oncoming thunderstorm.

Capital and the digital, these are the enthralling forces that orient the gravity of our desire. They provide just enough good that we are encouraged to let the reins loose. The loosening of the reins is always for the sake of freedom and empowerment. Until it’s not. Until it’s distended and profane, full of wicked, carnal, primal impulse, with our desires suspended above our heads just high enough that we’re never getting the whole thing. We’re always being sold what we don’t need, and often worse, what we already have. It is thus critical to re-enchant ourselves with the world around us. This is a vital enterprise. A present-day true, dignified “main character” asserts themselves as a GTA-type figure, one who challenges and engages with the dying physical polis. Laboring, like the men and women who built this city, to resuscitate that which is still magical and human.

Our transgression against these issues that capital and the digital present must materialize as reverence toward the other. Toward the external and the physically communal. Perhaps the next wave of insurgents follow the logic of rebellion but through an unprecedented tone. A pack of earnest iconoclasts looking to resist the tide of digital despondents. Wordsworth’s and Turner’s in fear of and deeply devoted to the sublimity around us; the “yes I said yes I will Yes” of a Molly Bloom seeking renewal and daring optimism in the face of fatiguing commitment. Is not true, noble rebellion the resistance against the qualities of a system that are destroying it? Are not the narcissistic compulsions and vulgar excesses of the digital world vacating and destroying the real world around us? The constant critiquing of social media can be labeled as trite but if it is still causing such widespread malaise why would we stop? Do we hear our mothers’ voices in our heads? Where have our responsibility and moral convictions gone? There is a hole in Los Angeles that you are on the brink of filling if you let it happen.

Go to the park, go on hikes, go to the cinema. Feel the story of this city within you. Enjoy gatherings and leisure. Feed the homeless. Risk sentimentality and the sincere. Our inheritance is rich and our posterity can be richer.

Behold the angels soaring through the sky, running on paths of light we cannot yet see.

Address of 8221 W Sunset Blvd, copy-and-pasted homostructural bodies thrusting in unison, shouting for clout, reaching velocity, absorbing a turmoil of sun and haze underneath the lid of the sky with our backs facing the eager smiles of Tumblr Indie Sleaze coquettes, men and women look the same, boys and girls do not exist, the grass is still wet from the dawn, breasts are collapsed into knees with throats vomiting acid blood and sucking whippets dry like it’s the last breath of love, everybody is conjoined at the hip with their baby mamas and baby daddies and children, as soon enough the whole congregation is molded into one ecstatic orb of sweat and soul.