Beverly Hills - Home of the neo-European

I like Beverly Hills. Maybe it’s my innate faux taste for thinly layered beauty. I don’t mean the prêt-a-porter, the grandiose yet quaint restaurants and the overdressed dogs guiding their over-payed owners into their oversized cars.

In fact, I hate the speakers strategically littered along Rodeo Drive, blaring out bland Christmas classics. I imagine some Wizard of Oz-type enigma deep in a burrow of Wilshire Boulevard controlling the soundscape for optimum material consumption. It didn’t work on me. I didn’t buy anything except for a rap demo from a very well dressed busker and his burly and somewhat intimidating gold-chained associate.

What I do like are the cafes that edge Santa Monica Boulevard on the fringes of the main shopping district. Here, leather dressed Mediterraneans and their Ducati Sportclassics meet the pavement with a sense of contagious ease.

They sit for hours smoking non-Cuban cigars, sipping chrome coloured coffee and greeting with hugs and kisses the passer-bys. After a while, one surpasses the assumption that they all know each other. I even walk-up eventually and introduce myself in broken French to share a moment of late-capitalism. A cappuccino and an Armani blazer is an entrance enough to any conversation here.

I sat for one whole afternoon outside one of these cafes, watching the expatriate locals as the sun set over the horizon of the boulevard. The hip blacks and tanned Italians leaning back and contemplating the idiosyncrasies of an ideal existence. They stare passively-out (they never lock eyes) at the masses of chrome that roll by; a “ciao bello”, “cava?” a “take it easy my friend”…

I like this passivity – actively taking it easy. I wonder what they all do for work, but I don’t want to ruin the idea of a life of coffees, cigars and casual banter.

East Los Angeles - Dresden in SoCal

The East of Los Angeles met with the same nemesis of late-capitalism to which so many other metropolitans have befallen. It is the wreckage of a failed social-welfare state collided with the more sinister darkness of mass-drug induction.

With the funding for public hospitals dramatically reduced and the housing for the mentally unstable destabilised, the psychologically and financially deprived roam the streets in droves. Blocks and blocks of unconscious militias collect with uncertain futures, sleeping and wandering between the wind-swept drives and avenues.

If only they could mobilise, they would prove an unsettling force to the thousands-strong Los Angeles Police Department (they did one week in 1992). However madness is kept at sea by the substitute medicine of crack cocaine. This is no perverse antibiotic though, no soma; theirs is a spark plug of anti-social behaviour and random atrocity threatening to under-siege the mainstays of LA that keeps the LAPD non-content.

The cityscape of downtown and the East LA rolls-on like a concrete mountain range – a horrid memory of bombed-out Europe. The architecture here is a marriage between minimalism and a lack of funding. They are monuments leftover from the apathetic anaesthesia that laid over all of America in the early 90s.

Whoever told the Americans they could do minimalism? The buildings look like leftovers of an unfinished terminal of LAX – concrete slabs of grey unearth, reaching out like broken sacrifices to the Hollywood Hills. The angles and corners meet at the street level with makeshift tents and shelters. The over-towering shadows cover up so much and so little of the decay. There is not even the memory of a dream here.

There are no white faces in East L.A, except for those resurrecting the old factory warehouses with art-studios and lower-East urbunes. But even those bodies don’t come out at night. They move gracefully inside with the slick of paint on canvas, transforming a portal from the dead-end avenues and junky terrains.

The one-way streets make for a dizzying maze of an inebriated hell. One has to track back through the layers of downtown’s inferno to find an escape route. As we drive down the broken boulevards, their eyes sink into our skulls as they penetrate into the car window. A “hey man, have you got some change?” and occasionally a “what the fuck are you looking at?” It’s ambiguous as to who are the ghosts – them or us.