It's the edge of the world and all of Western civilization
The sun may rise in the East, at least it settled in a final location
It's understood that Hollywood sells Californication
Starting off in the exact same place as my previous California article, I'll begin by witnessing that I first heard this song on MTV when it aired in 19991. I recall the video clip being quite impressive, with its sleek 3D graphics showing off views that would be later replicated in even more 3D detail in Grand Theft Auto games. I also remember not quite getting the gist of the lyrics until maybe fifteen years later, when it was clear that America was running at full speed in its late imperial phase. So there you go: it does take quite a long time for "culture and civilization" to travel from one part of the world to the other; and by the time it reaches its destination, it is dissolved in the local mud. Case in point: some of my fellow Romanians have just decided very recently that they don't like America too much2, and it took them about a quarter of a century to reach this state; and now America is already in its post-imperial phase.
By sheer coincidence, this Romanian decision came just about when I decided to go for a few days' stay in West LA, arriving in Burbank. The flight from SFO to Burbank was probably the worst in my life so far. Leaving aside that it got delayed for a couple of good hours, boy did that small Embraer go through a shitty storm, which had all of us passengers shaking like a bag of well-braced potatoes. So I guess that if we leave aside the fact that it was awful, it was also somewhat fun, but most importantly, it brought us to our destination safe and sound; and no one even cheered on the crew after the smooth landing; "smooth", or at least under the circumstances.
My first impression upon arriving is Burbank is that much to my complete unsurprise, West LA is exactly how they pictured it in the RHCP video and in GTA San Andreas.
The buildings sat huge in town and along the freeway, yes. But more than that, the people spoke and acted like they were in one of those video games, and it seems like it was particularly easy to get sucked into this one. For example: the driver who brought me to my destination in Agoura Hills was a self-described Armenian born in Persia3 with whom I had a cultural exchange in... I shit you not, rock'n'roll music. He was quite impressed with my familiarity with '70s and '80s metal, so he put on Black Sabbath and I started explaining to him how this music used to reach Romania back in the '70s and '80s, and that that was how I started listening to rock music in the early 2000s. Guess it took a whole other generation for American "culture and civilization" to reach Romania (which wasn't even yet a colony in the '70s!) and music was the lubricant. Anyway, this is how my mind reconstructed the local environment right on the spot, and how I managed to fit in and function immediately4.
Anyanyway, I arrived to Agoura Hills later that day and... this was the view next morning from my hotel room:
As far as I could tell in my short stay, The West LA county looks like a sort of... countryside? for middle and upper-middle class folks. It's not really a proper countryside, given that whatever agriculture goes on in this lands is industrialized; and on the other I couldn't really call them towns or even townlets, since despite their sharp ninety-degree turns, said "towns" are too loosely structured to be called so. Mostly, this structure is split between residential areas and "commerce centres" AKA malls, either small or large. The hills provide the overall landscape with some actual shape, but other than that it's all freeway-that, restaurant-this and mall-that. I suppose that at the point when I started realizing this, I was already missing Europe.
As for the urban landscape, I don't know, man... On one hand you have the Santa Monica beach,
or these views from various hills around town,
while on the other you have Hollywood, where everything Californian seems to have gathered in the same place. Somewhere on the street you'll notice the valley girl accent5; while close by you'll see a club with folks dancing on the street, next to a homeless guy who carries his entire home in a bunch of backpacks; while on the next street you get the fentanyl addicts, with their bodies bent and their eyes lost in a gaze towards the netherworld6. While, I shit you not, just a couple of miles away you have Beverly Hills7.
At this point I have to turn over to my fellow Bucharestians and ask them: please, don't let them nasty Muricans know that your town, with all its problems, is cleaner, although maybe not as lively, but overall a nicer place to live, even in its worst places -- believe me, I know. If Pipera is your Silicon Valley, then your Silicon Valley will very soon be a rather sad place; and if Buftea (lol!) is your Hollywood, then your Hollywood is hollow. There's really, really no need to go down this path, even if the exits are few and far between, and they're getting fewer and fewer each day. Ironic as this may sound, from now on you'd better start treasuring your water, nourishment and energy8 much more, since trust me, you've got more of each than these civilized folks, and the work to maintain that "more" in the long term will turn out to be quite a bitch.
All in all I'll admit, I haven't seen too much, so I can't pretend to have understood much of this experience. My weekdays were filled with various business, while the weekends consisted of running from one place to another to "see" things. I did see a couple of things, but I also missed a whole lot of them, so I guess I'll have to leave the deeper observations for the next time.
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And go figure, that was before 9/11! ↩
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Of course, most likely it wasn't them who actually decided this. It was apparently decided for them by the French. Or something. ↩
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Persia, not Iran. ↩
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Thanks Radio Free Europe, I guess? By the way, do you finally understand now how times have changed? This is what I mean by "imperial" and "post-imperial" phases and this is why you're worse off today than you were forty years ago. In the 1980s you had the communist shithole on one side and the "free world" on the other; nowadays, the only real way out is something akin to a bullet.
The world has changed deeply, structurally, however you want. It's not the same world that we lived in six years ago, let alone the 1980s. ↩
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I'm not even kidding -- they all speak the same pidgin as in that 1982 Zappa song. Now this they forgot to export to Romania. ↩
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For all the inane modern yapping about hell being hot or cold, our dear experts couldn't quite yet figure out that hell isn't one way or the other -- hell simply is the disappearance of all being (in the Heideggerian sense), that is, both physical and metaphysical.
In the Christian Orthodox tradition, the entirety of the funeral rite circles around the mantra "veșnică pomenire", i.e. approx. "eternal memory [of someone]", in the acute sense of "eternal evidence [that someone existed]". In a deeper sense, they are wishing the dead to be eternally in the hearts of people, to be known throughout history (the one of a family, say), or in other words, to not be forgotten.
The opposite of this habit of handing lore across generations and evoking symbols out of experience is just social atomization, which is what California, at least, seems to have signed up for. Fortunately, in the more rural areas one may find many small tight-knit societies of folks who at least on the surface seem to care a whole lot more for each other. ↩
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Of which Romanians are more familiar with the action over at 90210, or rather the fictional depiction thereof. ↩
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Laugh all you like, but that nutter put the precisely right agenda on the roadmap. Whether he had a realistic vision or whether he'd have even stuck to it is a whole other problem and more importantly, now we'll never know. So I for one have no reason to delve deeper into this particular pit. ↩
This brings back memories of when I visited California myself, specifically Menlo Park, San Fran, San Diego. Of course this was back a decade ago, and we didn't veer too much off the beaten path, so the reality is likely much worse now.
One of the feelings that struck me is that although all the fixtures of civilization and Nature were nominally there - buildings, trees, humanoids - everything seemed somehow... unreal, desaturated, desolate, holographic. One of those 'places that should not be'. It's probably because people really would not be able to live there without heavy and constant technological intervention.
The US is indeed huge and I would hope that there are places further up north that are more natural, more like something you would find in Romania, except more LGBT-friendly. One can't do without Liberty, Guns, Babes, Trump after all.