... and dreamt of becoming infinite

“ Los Angeles is a city without boundaries, which ate the desert, cut down the Joshua tree and the May pole, and dreamt of becoming infinite.

- Mike Davis, City of Quartz

Pilgrimage to the Future Catastrophe

I lived in Los Angeles for seven years—long enough, no doubt, to have formed deep personal associations and memories of the place; yet, anymore, when I visit, it feels less like a reunion and more like a pilgrimage to pay homage to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (who once called the city "the finished form of the future catastrophe").

There are many things to love about Los Angeles, and many things to hate. Too few people understand that they are the same things. The garish excess, the social stratification, the semi-disposability of everything: this is American capitalist culture at its apex. From my home in New York City, I can see the high-rise towers of the great financial investment banks in downtown Manhattan, but the view from these steel pinnacles is reserved for a privileged few: New York may be the brain of American capitalism, but its body is surely in the archipelago of shopping malls that run from the Sherman Oaks Galleria all the way down to Rodeo Drive.

To live in Los Angeles is to consume, literally and metaphorically: every time I leave my home, I'll consume gasoline, to consume the miles between me and my destination; and once I've arrived at that destination, I've probably gone there to shop for something. This is not unique to Los Angeles. "All America," said Baudrillard, "is Disneyland." But Los Angeles was first: the first freeways, the first fast food chains, the first suburbs, the first exurbs, the first malls.

"As goes California, so goes the nation."

California is also home to the contemporary incarnation of the American Dream. Hard work is no longer required! Just a telegenic attitude, and the right hair. "Style" and "fashion" are always meant to describe a subculture of people who are in style and in fashion; and therefore imply the far-larger set of people who are excluded and left behind. And every part of the culture industry is founded on the idea that what you have now is inadequate, compared to what you might have tomorrow. Each new thing exists only long enough to be consumed by its children—next year's line of clothes, or cars, or smartphones, or pre-fab houses; next year's films, television pilots, and rising stars.

That's the dialectic of Los Angeles: its ephemera is its vitality. Everything is precipitous—at the edge of the continent, at the edge of fashion, at the edge of technology—and all of it is premised on an underlying implied destruction: some day an earthquake (again, literal and metaphoric) will carry all this into the sea.