It will soon be six months since I returned to Los Angeles from Argentina. It was initially sad coming back here from South America to a nascent economic depression, but I was soon so busy after an unplanned absence of nine months that I have not written much during this period. It has been a productive interlude nonetheless, both personally and for Pan American Dreams, and a few new entries bringing the project plan up to date will follow over the next few weeks.
In the interim, L.A. continues to impress itself vividly upon anyone living here. For example, although I am not a habitué of Starbucks, I walked to one of their nearby stores this afternoon during a short break, and a foamy blast of L.A.'s unique cultural brew greeted me the minute I stepped in the door. The fellow manning the cappuccino machine was talking to a customer as he mixed up his mocha java something or other. It seems he had just finished filming six episodes of a project of some kind with his friends acting as his cast and crew, and the customer had done something similar, so they were loudly talking shop over the coffee machine noise - distribution, financing, rights, etc.
 |
The handsome African American guy in line in front of me suddenly chimed in that he was a professional photographer and handed both of them his business card, then launched into a brief and practiced pitch about his services: X number of free head shots, a free disc with all the images after the shoot, be sure to visit the website, etc. They were all calling one another "bro" by the time I got waited on.
I got my coffee and found an open spot on the crowded outdoor patio, where a couple seated on the wooden bench directly across from me was having a heated argument.
"What is wrong with you? You are obviously sexually insecure," she blurted out for everyone to hear.
"Well fuck you," he shot back loudly, "you're obviously projecting your own goddamned insecurities onto me."
I was alarmed, but they seemed under control in spite of their obvious intensity and loud swearing. This continued for a couple of minutes, getting more heated with every exchange; and then I noticed the scripts in their laps. Of course! They were rehearsing. In public. For our entertainment.
This is such a typical L.A. experience that none of the other patrons on the patio even bothered to look up from their cell phone messages and laptop computers. After all, everyone was there to be seen, so the impromptu rehearsal simply enhanced the fish bowl ambience as they continued sipping their lattes and sending urgent emails into the ether hoping for a response.
L.A. is an amazing city, unique in the world, but it is often as shallow as a dinner plate. Of course this openness, this facile surface is also a vital part of the city's appeal. Everyone is in "the biz," and there is no need to be shy or coy about it. Tens of thousands of people are here to make it, to become rich and famous, to do crazy things, take wild risks, express themselves and put it all on the line in ways that would have been unimaginable back in Topeka or Poughkeepsie or Bismarck.
As much as we might complain about the more corrosive aspects of celebrity culture, in Los Angeles, as a celebrity-stricken, Dalai Lama chasing friend once pointed out to me, there is a unique sense of endless possibility and optimism that can be quite catching. There are plenty of snares for the unwary, but there is also a rich mix of go-for-broke fearlessness and wild creativity, people chasing dreams of every conceivable stripe. When you combine this with both the possibility and the sometime reality of people making boatloads of money, it creates a buoyant future-oriented form of social energy that is always palpable here on the shaky edge of the continent.
There is much more to Los Angeles than just Hollywood, of course, with many unique facets of American life to be explored in this giant megalopolis. I'll talk more about that in the coming weeks as I give updates on Pan American Dreams.
As a kind of footnote, it is interesting to point out that a couple of months before I left Buenos Aires, the first Starbucks in Argentina opened in the fashionable Palermo barrio. It was quite a big deal, with feature articles beforehand in El Clarín, the nation's leading newspaper, debating whether it would succeed in a city where the people loved their traditional mozos (waiters) and preferred a more leisurely pace. Alas, the shiny and efficient new Argentine Starbucks seemed to have standing room only every time I walked by, never mind that there are wonderful local coffee shops in every neighborhood with colorful waiters and, in my opinion, better coffee. Ristretto (photo below) is less than a block away from Starbucks!
 |
 |
