Los Angeles

City of Angels--what a nice name for a place, huh? I've been there mainly to visit my uncle and aunt and their daughter and her family who live in two apartments relatively near to each other in Beverly Hills--and we spend time in their living rooms and kitchens and then drive around and eat good food and go to the mall and I know it's a place I wouldn't necessarily want to live but I could because it's so big and so varied that there's certainly some neat stuff going on always and there are so many different sorts of people who live there, but there's the whole car thing, the freeway thing, which is what most people talk about when they say why they couldn't or wouldn't live there. But more than that, L.A. is a place in my imagination, thanks to movies and books, and it's had a decided resurgence on that level lately. I just finished reading Shalimar the Clown, by Salman Rushdie. It is a novel primarily about Kashmir, but also perhaps about how its characters carry the weight of Kashmir to the U.S., and L.A. in particular, and Rushdie awesomely renders the metropolis, for example:

"That the city had no focal point, he professed hugely to admire. The idea of the center was in his view out-dated, oligarchic, an arrogant anachronism. To believe such a thing was to consign most of life to the periphery, to marginalize and in doing was to devalue. The decentered promiscuous sprawl of this giant invertebrate blob, this jellyfish of concrete and light, made it the true democratic city of the future."

Then also I just finished plowed through Less than Zero, which I would only recommend if you are in the mood for something really fast and pretty depressing and not too well written but fascinating just the same. For those unfamiliar, the novel follows Clay as he goes back to L.A. after four months in college in New Hampshire. He revisits his friends and becomes drawn into a depressing and dehumanizing spiral of sex and drugs and disturbing family interactions that is home. And all along I wanted to know why he was so fucked up, and if he had the power to be his own salvation, and I guess the novel answered these questions but never in much of a way that satisfied me. Though, since it was published in the 80's the book serves as a historical testiment, as well as an intriguing study in first person narration. I'm going to take up American Psycho next, and a little scared about that, but hoping the writing will wow me more, and wondering if I'll have the stomach to read it.

I have been feeling under the weather and last night stayed in, mostly in bed watching "Short Cuts," which Robert Altman made in the late 90's, I guess, based on a few of Raymond Carver's short stories and starring a crazy cast including folks such as Juliane Moore and Robert Downey Jr and Jack Lemmon, and managing to tell the stories of more than twenty characters. I'm about halfway through the 3-hour movie so far and am caught up in all the characters but also a bit bothered by how short the scenes are, though all the shifting around and continuous building of often tenuous connections between characters certainly does paint a varied and fascinating picture of the City of Angels...