I am a
fiction writer. I live in
Los Angeles.
I once was asked, 'Why LA? Don't all fiction writers want to live in
New York?'
Presumably because of the publishing industry?
I can't live in New York. I must live in a place that inspires me.
Los Angeles is that place.
It's not the ends of the earth or the land of disappointment. It's neither
Hell nor
Paradise nor a
smog-filled cesspool of platinum blonde airheads. No, it's all of these at once, and more, and this is what makes it poetic.
Los Angeles is a polluted city full of beautiful and desperate people. It's an overpopulated
desert. It's content in its
contradiction; it is in cultural excess of everything. It's clusters of
palm trees against a backdrop of
skyscrapers. It's a gigantic
green and
concrete coffee shop. It boasts the richest people in the country, and the most poor. It's a glittering beacon of
beauty laced with deadly poison.
When I stand on a sidewalk corner, I can look around and see stories everywhere, jumping out, overflowing. It's a city of everything, and everyone has their own tale - of
success, of
failure, of
compromise. Look at the old lady wearing a
handkerchief and pushing a
shopping cart, dancing in circles around the rest of the world. Look at the blonde mother on the
freeway consoling her Hispanic son. Look at the
dreadlocked drummers underneath purple flowers that line the
surface streets, alternating with palms, dotting the buildings with color. Look at the
mohawked boy shuffling into
Amoeba Music with no one else on his arm. Look at the swimmers, at the showers of
tourists, walking the boardwalk and screaming to the beat of the
rollercoaster on the
Santa Monica Pier.
Is everything here perfect? Of course not.
Perfection does not make art.
Reflection does. And I use everything as a
mirror: the
palms, the
concrete, the
coffee shops, the
movie stars, the
sun, the
smog, the
freeway. The police
sirens after dark and going to sleep to the hum of
helicopters. The
neon from my window, and the fact that you can drive for miles and not see a single building over four stories, then suddenly a
high rise will appear out of nowhere and dominate the landscape.
Like this city, fiction is a mix of the beautiful and the ugly, the profane and the sacred, the stars and the slums. Like this city, it seems to know that moments are wasted on rushing. Like this city, it sees
art in every single day.