A Dispatch On A Place I Didn't Stay Very Long

I think LA might be kind of terrible

At the end of May I made a stopover in what is usually considered one of America’s ~5 Great Cities; a friend drove up from her home a few hours to the south, and we spent a day and a night together in Los Angeles. Of course, a day of wandering around, mostly in Downtown Santa Monica and on the beach, is hardly enough time to develop a good mental image of a city and its character, and yet I was so struck by how different it felt to anything I’d experienced before that I knew I wanted to write something down. Below are some impressions:

Venice Beach—from Wikipedia

Sprawl, Metropolis, and the Nature of American Civilisation

The disagreement between those who see American Civilisation as mostly novel and unique, and those who see it as an innovation on and extension of the European Civilisational model is as esoteric as it is consequential. FDR’s perception of the contrast between America as a democratic Superpower and the European Empires had far-reaching effects on the shape of the postwar world, and the current Vice President’s clear belief that the US and Europe are sister-civilisations is currently shaping American policy towards the continent. Loath as I may be to side with the latter, I find myself firmly in the camp of America as a European and specifically British offshoot. Experiencing LA for the first time gave me more sympathy for how people end up in the other camp.

I come from one of the original 13 colonies, and I currently live in another; our states predate America as a country, founded by men and women who came directly from Europe and brought their cultures with them. Our counties and streets bear the names of British kings and nobles as often as they do a small set of revolutionaries, and our oldest institutions were endowed by the Crown and its colonial representatives. Our cities, though young by European standards, are ancient by those of North America, from metropolises like New York and Boston that grew organically as trade and commerce bloomed to the results of a particular style of Enlightenment utopian planning like DC and Savannah. Critically, in terms of the built environment these cities grew up in the era of riverine and animal-powered transportation, or at their latest in the heyday of railroads. When automobile infrastructure cut its destructive path through North Americans’ cities, laws, and minds, the East Coast cities were best poised to survive the onslaught. Even as their outer suburbs have sprawled it remains obvious that the cores of the cities on the Northeast Corridor and beyond were built for another time, their shapes dictated by history and necessity rather than modern planning regimes.

Even from the approach to LAX, it was obvious that this city was a different beast entirely; the older downtowns (plural, because LA seems to be much more an agglomeration of towns and suburbs than a centralised city) are utterly dwarfed by endless neighbourhoods of one- and two-story houses and low-rise shops. On the ground you can taste the particularly 20th-century flavour of hypermodernity—you can see how all this felt sleek and futuristic in the 70s, even if now the highways are choked with too many cars and ten-million-dollar houses are left in quiet decay due to arcane property tax law. Which is all to say that I can see how, living in a place that is so much a product of the late 20th century—where the legacy of the first colonists amounts to a few ruins rather than the core and identity of the city—one might come to the conclusion that America has little to do with Europe, that we live in a country that has and will continue to make its own destiny out of whole cloth. It is also to say that I don’t think I could be happy in LA. A part of my soul remains in the far-flung, sparsely-populated places of the world, like the Appalachian Mountains of my youth and the Scottish Highlands my ancestors left, and another part has grown attached to the constant heat and overstimulation of great cities like DC, New York, and the Asian metropolises that have nurtured me in brief, critical periods of my life—both parts, however, recoiled from LA.

Venice Beach: Models, Homeless, and a Brief Spiritual Crisis

I’ve existed for about a year on the far fringes of the fashion world, or perhaps merely awareness of it. It’s not a world I’m trying to work my way towards the centre of, but it’s one I’ve enjoyed learning about, and I’ve become increasingly fascinated by how people dress and, more broadly, how they carry and present themselves to the world. Cities—or at least their elite populations—develop their own particular character about these things. DC is dominated by office culture; New York is more varied but has a certain gritty, practical streak as a through-line. It’s a dirty city, and even its richest echelons tend to do quite a bit of walking, so the everyday wardrobes of even the most elite and avant-garde adapt around this; there’s a certain “feral model” look that you eventually learn to spot in the wild. Not so in my brief experience of Southern California; if the models and actresses in New York are trying to dress down, everyone in LA is trying to dress up. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, but even across subcultural lines I noticed that everyone looks just a bit more polished, more made up, sleeker. Maybe a city built on the entertainment industry would always prize artifice over (perceived) authenticity, maybe it’s more driving and less walking, or maybe (as my petty East-Coast nationalism wants to believe) it’s a kind of region-wide status-anxiety—maybe models in NYC don’t feel the need to go out with perfect makeup for the same reason that finance bros don’t post about lifting weights in the office.

The other thing that stood out on Venice Beach was the street market and the woo that more than half the stalls were hawking. I’m talking crystals, tarot (decks and readings), all manner of vaguely eastern-flavoured iconography, incense, more crystals, palm readings, even people straight up offering to cast spells for money. Now, I’ve been in my fair share of esoteric bookstores, and I won’t deny that there’s often a slightly seedy vibe to those, but I’ve never seen anything that compares to the sheer amount of supposed magic for sale on Venice Beach or the hollowness I felt at it all. As someone who seriously practices an ~esoteric religion and is currently in training for a skill that skirts the line between woo and mainstream health/fitness, it prompted a minor crisis of faith. Is this what it all leads to? Am I just a better class of these hucksters? It was brief and I recovered, but for a moment there part of me was ready to pack it all up and revert to Anglicanism.¹

The one really positive thing I have to say about Venice Beach regards the homeless population. New York, and to a lesser extent DC have a lot of actually quite threatening homeless people. I feel the need to point out strongly here that this isn’t a comment on the moral culpability of the people in question—homelessness is an awful, dehumanising experience that is likely to rob a person of many of their faculties and the better angels of their nature—but a description of an existing reality. Yes, you are far more likely to be hurt in a car accident than by an assailant on the subway (homeless or otherwise), but pretending being physically blocked and screamed at isn’t a scary experience where someone would feel justifiably threatened is absurd.² At any rate, I didn’t notice anyone like this on Venice Beach. There were plenty of visibly homeless people sleeping rough, but they all more or less either kept to themselves or panhandled quietly. Honestly, I think it’s the weather. Beyond the general pleasantness of the beach, I’m told that it doesn’t really get cold in Southern California and it doesn’t rain much, and while it’s cruel to make people homeless anywhere, there’s a particular cruelty in leaving someone unsheltered in a place where the temperature drops well below freezing for much of the winter and thunderstorms are a regular occurrence. That cruelty likely breeds a different kind of alienation and mental degradation that isn’t present everywhere. Ultimately, a walk through any American city in the 2020’s is going to include these reminders of how badly we’re failing as a society.³

In Conclusion

My single most salient and overriding thought about LA was how beautiful the natural landscape is and how badly we’ve made a mess of it. The jagged, stony mountains giving way directly to inviting beaches was reminiscent of Iceland for me and almost as enticing—as much as I love the South, the forested flatlands of the Tidewater make me genuinely nervous, evoking, I suspect, genetic memories of the first Indo-Europeans to conquer Britain being ambushed by Early European Farmers in the bogs. It’s a tragedy that we found one of the places with the best weather and scenery on earth and then proceeded to pave over much of it, limit that paved Walden to now-outrageously expensive single-family homes, and mismanage the local forests so badly that they burn catastrophically nearly every year. I’m hoping to spend some more time in California when I return to the United States, and maybe I’ll have more and better things to say about it then; before that, I’ll have some updates on what I’ve been doing in the Orient.

1. The fact that Anglicanism is the default (and only) Christian reversion that even comes to mind probably suggests that I would always remain something of an incorrigible mystic.

2. A topic I might write about in the future are the different ways that people experience different types of danger and the ways that we tend to overate threats that feel more “personal”. I think this is likely a baked in feature of human cognition, and those of us who are serious about solving these problems need to work around it rather than scolding people.

3. It’s not my domain and this isn’t a YIMBY urbanism blog, but it bears mentioning that many of the decisions that led us to this failure state are technical, and even at times well meaning, as opposed to archetypically evil—things like banning what have traditionally been the bottom rung of the housing market (boardinghouses/SRO’s) and using zoning to protect middle-class home values.