Just Head West Down Sunset. . .

Come on let's go to where it's fun I want a slice of L.A. sun. . .      Several years ago I took a trip to Los Angeles to visit family.  I had no real desire to go beyond that, as LA did not, in my mind, exist as any kind of vacation destination. It was vague and diffuse, artificial, self-absorbed, smug, vapid and any other adjective that conveyed a sense of unreality. NY can take care of its huddled masses, LA can have fun, fun, fun, but I'm from Chicago; we've got work to do and don't have time for that crap.

Honey let's go. . .

Recently I went back to take care of some different family business, and discovered that it is still vague and diffuse, self-absorbed, smug, vapid and overwhelmingly, stratospherically, with a totality beyond comprehension-ally, unreal.

And that's exactly what it's supposed to be.

So come along and pay the price

This ain't New York this tasty slice
 

In Hawthorne, near the corner of 119th and Doty, is a memorial to the boyhood home of the Beach Boys which says, in part, "It was here. . .during Labor Day weekend 1961. . .the music of the Wilsons broadcast to the world an image of California as a place of sun, surf, and romance." It may as well have said the California Promise, the California Myth, the California Dream. As I stood there in the shadow of what is now the I-105 bypass, I thought of what it was like back then, of how many post-war families headed West, modern day Joads in search of what was surely a promised land. And although they certainly couldn't have believed the streets would be paved with gold, they knew the sun was shining, the breezes blowing, and anything was possible.

Take a minute listen to this town

Don't you ever feel you have to come

Take a minute she won't let you down

Those first years of the Baby Boom were like a 20th century stampede, as people left the wars and the hardships and the winters behind, heading for the very things they knew they had fought for: their chance, their opportunity to grab their part of the California (née American) Dream and run with it. And where better to stake their claim than Los Angeles, the city driven by the dreams and imagination and starry eyes of Hollywood. Anything was possible! Stars are born, fortunes made, and every day dissolves like candy in the ocean. And LA fed that optimism right back, rewarding just enough of them to make it seem as if there was plenty for everyone. But, of course, there wasn't, though that didn't really matter. The important thing, the main thing, the only thing, was that you believed there was. And that honest deception was enough for LA. It drank that collective hope and grew so that there was room for more dreamers, more possibility, more unreality. And of course the dreamers came, and the cycle repeated, and the city grew ever more diffuse, artificial, self-absorbed, smug, vapid and unreal.

Which is exactly what it's supposed to do. 

Because each of us, safe—or stuck—in our jobs and homes and carefully circumscribed lives, we all need to know there's a place where the sun is always shining, your dream is always just around the corner, and the surf is always up.

See you excited in her arms

L.A. and all her crazy charms*

Even if we never act upon any of that, we need to know it's there.

I finally get it now.

*The Raveonettes Ode to L.A.