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.