Here in Los Angeles. A roller-coaster of an adventure that continues to unfold, or more accurately carom, around hairpin banked turns and sudden drops and risings. Am I making to much of the mania? The mania is in me, is the thing to be clear about. Outside, the world spins utterly quiet. There are perfect moments every moment. People going about their lives, oblivious to all that is afire around them. Everything is oxidizing, and if you just take a moment and look at it, you will see this too.
How to make a film about this sensation?
And yes, it's very scary. I don't doubt that I'll find work, sooner or later. But I am considerably worried that I will find more work that I don't enjoy, that doesn't speak to me as a person or as a being, or an intelligence, or a body, or anything. That I will fall into another compromise with myself, with my desires, my dreams, my sense of right and wrong. I am doing something brave by coming out here. Or cowardly. Who knows? I can't, I won't know, until much later, if ever. We just aren't given to understand these things. If we're very lucky, they say, we get to live long enough to see some kind of pattern emerge, some meaning begin to coalesce, the impression of a leaf on a piece of paper smeared with graphite. An image appears, gradually. What a miracle!
But the world is so big, and I'm so small. There are a million people in the few square miles that surround me, mostly paved, pocked with florets of palm trees. A million lives I'll never know, who will never know me, and why should any of us? Can we feel the awful suffering that exists just down the hall? On the other side of me, someone might be dying. How can God keep track of it all? I know, I know, he's God - right - but does he expand as the world does? Or is being infinite enough?
Early in the night, Nina and I stood on the overlook on Mulholland Drive. The massive expanse of Los Angeles below us, a great and terrifying (and beautiful) electric blanket stretched out forever, its wires and bulbs all frayed and aglow. The sky was murky; even in the dark, you could see that the smog was heavy. There is that end-of-the-earth feeling in LA that just doesn't go away. This, I feel, is an irrefutable claim on urban, even existential grandiosity that trumps even New York. New York, for all of its history, its a tireless booster of itself. It brooks no negativity. It is exhaustingly upbeat. It cannot countenance failure, rejection, or death. It cannot consider endings. But Los Angeles, for all of the shit it gets for being shallow and dumb and ugly, is a place that must face, day after day, its own obsolescense. The way it has just metastasized, spreading its foul wind across paradise, corrupting this hallowed, peaceful, placid land. LA is morbidly obese. It's a bit like Falstaff, jovially laughing at excess and death.
And yet, there is the side of LA that is responsible, that is cleaning up it's act, that is expanding the Metro and putting ever-more-stringent requirements on gas vehicle emissions. Is this quiant, part of the city's own hopeless, quixotic appeal? Or a corrective to the insanity of limitless growth, of blind, irrational expansionism? We'll see I guess, if we live long enough.
