(no subject)

[d_aulnoy]

Frankly, I think Francesca Lia Block has a lot to answer for.*

When I moved out to LA, I had expectations, most of which were engendered by pop culture, and which were influenced most heavily of all by the Weetzie Bat books.  Damnit, when I got to LA, I was expecting jacaranda and bougainvillea, twinkly white fairy lights everywhere,glitter and dried rose petals, punks who were still punk at my age and beyond, and maybe a genie.  Okay, I guess maybe not really the genie, but at least a genie-friendly attitude of possibility.

Then again, I can't say she didn't warn me: 

"What does 'happily ever after' mean anyway, Dirk?"  Weetzie said.  She was thinking about buildings.  The Jetson-style Tiny Naylor's with the roller-skating waitresses had been torn down.  In its place was a record-video store, a pizza place, a cookie place, a Wendy's, and Penguin's Yogurt.  Across the street, the old Poseur, where Weetzie and Dirk had bought kilts, was a beauty salon.  They had written their names on the columns of the porch but all the graffitti had been painted over.  Even Elvis Land was gone.  Elvis Land had been in the front yard of an old house on Melrose.  There had been a beat-up pink Cadillac, a picture of Elvis, and a giant love letter to Elvis on the lawn.

Then there had been the old places.  Like the Tiki restaurant in the Valley, which had gone out of business years ago and had become overgrown with reeds so that the Tiki totems peered out of the watery-sounding darkness.  Now it was gone - turned into one of the restaurants that lined Venture Boulevard with valets in red jackets sitting out in the heat all day waiting for BMW's.  And Kiddie Land, the amusement park where Weetzie's dad, Charlie, had taken her (Weetzie's pony had just dawdled, and sometimes turned around and gone back to the start, because Weetzie wouldn't use the whip, and once Weetzie was traumatized by a plastic cow that swung onto the track); Kiddie Land was now the big, brown Beverly Center that Weetzie would have painted almost any other color - at least, if they had to go ahead and put it up in the place of Kiddie Land.

"What does happily ever after mean, anyway?" Weetzie said.
-Weetzie Bat

The moral of that passage is, "happily ever after" doesn't mean LA, or at least, not the LA the propogates itself via lowest-common-denominator profit, the LA of strip malls and strippers and implants, of suburbia and "good school districts" and an all-pervasive car-culture, of pre-fab construction and endless highways and the color brown.  But the moral of the book as a whole is that in a place as monochrome and homogenous and dispirited as this one, it's important to make your own happily ever after ... may it involve jacaranda and bougainvillea and glitter and rose petals  and staying yourself till the (hopefully not so) bitter end.

So!  Yesterday, we went to Silver Lake.  Silver Lake is the "hip" LA neighborhood, sort of like a 1:12 scale Park Slope.  After the disappointment of other putatively cool LA neightborhoods (sorry, but Venice Beach is trying too damned hard to be Cony Island, and Melrose Place is what happens when you Xerox St. Mark's and lay the results end to end for a couple of miles), I didn't really have high hopes, but Silver Lake (all three blocks of it) is actually pretty cool!  This is due, in large part, I think, to the fact that everybody there has also read the Weetzie Bat books, and is self-consciously dedicated to recreating their aesthetic.

To whit: there's a vintage shop called Ragg Mopp.  It stocks bizarrely wonderful things like Indian headdresses and glittery chiffon party dresses and a blue velvet opera coat with a violet silk lining that may have come home with me.  There was also bougainvillea draped over everything, and twinkly white fairy lights, and a place called the Casbah Cafe that had been painted with a mural a la the Arabian Nights (genie-friendly!  and, that wasn't even a deliberate thought in my head when I started the entry ....) and a general atmosphere of possibility.  Silver Lake, I dub thee Francesca Lia Block Land, and I grant you the dubious honor of being my favorite neighborhood in LA.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this, as I ran into a colleague and her wife on the street (seriously, my first time this has happened in LA!  in NY, it's no big/an opportunity for all involved to say trite things like "Small world!" and "Great minds think alike!" but out here, it feels portentous - it is the only good neighborhood!) and then met up with msmsgirl  and her husband for dinner at a really cool Mexican place that had flocked red velvet wallpaper, gold lanterns, strawberry-infused tequila, and red glass candle-holders on all the tables.  It was bliss!  msmsgirl  was clever enough to bring BPAL for sniffing, gifting me with an imp of Gingerbread Poppet and giving me my second dose of BPAL goodness in the day - I hadn't realized BPAL had actual retailers out here!  Le Pink and Co. had one last lone bottle of Peacocks left - did you think I could resist?  She also brought her ridiculously adorable little dog Darla with her.  So cute!  Methinks I forsee future visits.

But now, for the complete antithesis of FLB-Land, off to the drudgery of grading ... did I mention that this week is our "break" between terms?  I say break-with-scare-quotes because I have till Wednesday to finish grading, and then the next term with its new classes begins next Tuesday ... and somewhere in between, I have to write a book review and a conference paper.  What would FLB do?  Grade in the blue velvet opera coat, and pray for a genie, I think.  It is better than the alternative of grading sans opera coat and sans hope, I guess ....
 

*Goddamnit!  Judging by the link, she was doing a reading not too far away from where we were last night.  Curses, LA!  Once again, you foil me with your tinsly disappointment. 

Comments

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I can so relate to this entry!

FLB for Los Angeles is what for me "Winter's Tale" and Nicholas Christopher's "Veronica" were for New York--except that in New York the magic is there, everywhere, and in Los Angeles I felt like I was always looking for that FLB world, and it remained out of my reach.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

YES. Exactly. NY may live down to its reputation of being grey and unfriendly, but it also lives *up* to its reputation of being colorful and alive and full of wonder - and the funny thing is, those reputations can overlap and occupy the same space at times. NY gives back to you what you put into it. LA, on the other hand ... LA is more what-you-see-is-what-you-get, so you really have to find a bit where you like what you see. And that can be ... tough. Bah, LA.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

it's true. I felt so cheated in LA when I didn't find the Weetzie Bat world. That made New York even more magical afterwards, though. Did you ever read "Winter's Tale"?

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

You know, I own a copy, and have for 10 years plus, but it's one of those books that's just always sort of been a perpetual intention. I take it that should be my reward to myself when I finish grading?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

oh yes, absolutely!

[deliasherman.livejournal.com]

YOU HAVEN'T READ WINTER'S. . . Um, excuse me for shouting. Let me try again. You haven't read Winter's Tale? Hmm. Interesting. Well, now you have something to look forward to. This was a Very Important Book for me when I was exiled in Boston.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! Will it make me feel better about visiting a magical NY if only temporarily and in the imagination, or will it just make me nauseously homesick?

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

The FLB LA is there, but it's in hidden corners and around the edges and you sort of have to stumble across it or know where it is to find it past the suburban plastic.

On the other hand, I remember just how homesick those books made me my first year of college. (Don't get me wrong, I love the Twin Cities and they have their own sort of magic, but some days I wanted home. And the Weetzie Bat books were like this other window into home for me. It wasn't quite the home I knew, but it was a few blocks over from it.)

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Heh - there are NY books that totally give me that sense of exile from home. The one lapsed_modernist mentioned above, _Veronica_, is one of them: Rosemary Edgehill's _Bast_ novels do the same thing, as do a handful of good fantasy novels that just epitomize "proper city" to me, even when the city isn't explicitly NY (the _Borderlands_ books, Ellen Kushner's _Swordspoint_, etc.).

Regarding LA, I'd be curious to know if there were other books that gave one some insight into the appeal of LA ... and if you could point me towards the hidden corners of coolness? :)

P.S. - I really like this idea of adjacent realities ....

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

I'll... have to think about it.

Tim Powers. Tim Powers is also good at capturing magical realism L.A.

I'm sure there are others, but I'll have to think about it.

Though I really encountered Tim Powers while I was in L.A. so it wasn't quite the same, but... it's that same kind of 'Yes, you've gotten L.A. right.'

Though part of the problem with L.A. is that it's not... one place. It's a lot of little places and it changes and shows different faces as you move from neighborhood to neighbohood. There are things which are somehow very L.A, but they're hard to explain to outsiders.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Hm ... I read _Anubis Gates_, and I didn't really love it, so I didn't hunt down additional Powers: after I read _Winter's Tale_ (or else! is the reaction I'm picking up from the f-list), I'll have to see which Powers are set in LA.

And, yes ... New York isn't one place either, but somehow all of the little delightful weirdnesses seem more accessible, possibly because they're right on top of one another: turn a corner, find a marvel. Here, I get the feeling that one either needs to be a hell of a lot more patient, a hell of a lot luckier, or possessed of really awesome gas mileage. :)

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

Last Call is partially in L.A. but largely in Las Vegas.

Expiration Date is mostly in L.A. (as is Earthquake Weather. Those three should probably be read in the order Last Call, Expiration Date, Earthquake Weather, but you could probably reverse the first two without it being a problem. You definitely need to read the first two before the third, though, or you will be horribly confused.)

Oddly, Dinner and Deviant's Palace, while in a weird post-appocalyptic LA still, somehow gives a feeling of what LA would turn into in that world.


I should note: Power's LA is not as pretty as Block's. It's a lot darker and a lot more dangerous.

[heathencorp.livejournal.com]

I went to LA once when I was a kid and didn't like it, but the FLB books made me want to-- more than that, though, they made me want to build my own world the way everyone does in the books, to wear feathers in my hair and fill my house with weird artifacts and fresh flowers, to build a family out of the wonderful weird friends I have, and to eventually bring really weird children into this better space. I had that for a while when I was in the dorms and all my friends were in one place, on the same page, and I'll probably be spending all my life trying to regain it... We're close now, with our much fewer numbers here at Spiderskull Island (Comma The Orchards At), and maybe we can do it. Two of the five of us have read these books!

~:)

Also, they make me want to tattoo 'love is a dangerous angel' down my spine.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Heh - I like this. But to build one's own world, one needs a shared aesthetic ... and while some of my friends have read FLB, most of them skew towards the minimalist. Seriously, they'd have better luck recreating the world of Mondrian than FLB. Sigh.

Maybe this is why I like ICFA and WisCon and fandom in general so much ....

[heathencorp.livejournal.com]

It's certainly why I do! It's like Lobby if Lobby were full of people who were already famous from all over the world, rather than just us schmos who will one day be famous.

I can appreciate minimalism, but I can't live that way. Minimalist homes feel so cold and empty and unlivedin and... fake? Like a picture rather than a place where people actually live. Or... I don't know, pretentious? In that way where you deny that you ever had a past, and don't bring anything with you from your childhood? I've seen some very nice Minimalist and Zen homes, but I just can't do it. I like my lush treasure-box rooms.

~:)

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

LA is... really not good for visiting. There are a lot of good things about living here (and not a few bad things), but... they're the sorts of things that it's really hard to show to tourists. Or you can, but it's hard to explain, because the magic of L.A. is that little taqueria or that store over there that you know has the neatest selection of stuff or the restaurant with the celing covered in pinatas (sadly, now LONG closed.)

It's in billboard ads in Spanish for Korean kimchi bowls. It's in all the little gardens and museums and there almost always being good free/cheap concerts to go to.

It's in knowing where all the cool murals are or the really good mochi shop or the Japanese diner that's open until three. It's in watching the punks and the club kids and the old men who've been coming there since they were a kid share Cantor's. (For that matter, the wait staff at Cantor's are sort of equally divided between punks and blue-haired ladies who have clearly been there forever.)

It's in having tacos with kimchi and standing in line to get into the dumpling house (though they've now opened a larger one so you don't have to wait so much anymore.)

It's in the Museum of California Art being right next to the Pacific Asia Museum.

It's in arguing about whether Buster's or The Fair Oaks Pharmacy is the better soda fountain/ice cream place in South Pas. Or a similar argument about whether you like In-N-Out or Pie and Burger.

And sadly, sometimes the cool places close and you have to find new ones, but... yeah, having a native guide who understands helps. Because honestly, most of the cool things won't show up on tourist maps, or if they do, there's no good way to distinguish them from the plastic.

[heathencorp.livejournal.com]

This sounds much better than I saw. But still... basic aversion to massive super-cities + bad lungs + impatience at the tourist crap = I'm probably never going to go there without a damn good reason. Maybe I'll visit you one day, and you can show me all the good things.

I think there's probably magic everywhere, but it's the finding it part that sucks. Here, we've got a double decker bus outside an authentic English pub miles from anywhere, beaches that glow blue and green and squeak like Styrofoam when you scuff your feet through them, flowers everywhere in the spring, the Fountain of Youth (which is not nearly as touristy as it thinks it is), pancakes in an old mill out at the springs, a local winery that gives free tours, a Cuban place that tastes just like the food my gramma used to cook before she got diabetic, a miniature park with a full-size statue of St Francis that's always covered in birdseed and therefore birds, weird little antique shops all over, a waffle place run by a Polish guy who barely speaks English, nature trails through the prehistoric dunes half a mile from the beach...

But I still want to live somewhere else.

~;)

[schrodingersgnu.livejournal.com]

Pie and Burger serves burgers now? Huh, who knew? We always went there for pie after we'd been hiking in the mountains...