There’s a pretty decent interview with Jordan Harper where he talks all things Los Angeles and he’s got some great one-liners (“This city is such a ball of contradictions—I love that we aren’t hidden from the violence of the world, but we also aren’t hidden from the beauty of it.”)

I think my favorite though comes toward the end when he’s asked about the nature of LA—

I just think that Los Angeles is the most American city. It is kind of the culmination of everything we think about ourselves and the truth about ourselves … New York, that’s a European city, they just happened to land here. People in the Midwest want to think that they’re different than us, but they’re captured by the same things: it’s real estate and money and guns and cops and sex and violence and dreams. This is the place where American dreams come from. Nobody talks about the American Real, they talk about the American Dream … This is America dreaming itself, right?

I wholeheartedly agree and I think that’s why I’ve always gravitated towards LA—even before I moved here I’d visit often and enjoy every moment. Even though most of my personal views are antithetical to much of what the city represents, underneath the Hollywood sheen does lie the foundations of what the United States is, for better and worse, and that’s a fascinating thing to observe while the empire is in a rapid state of decay.

If nothing else, Los Angeles is the cultural hub of America. While New York might represent the ‘Art World’ more, artists in LA have always had to clash and compromise with the world of entertainment—which is just art with its neck under the boot of capitalism. So much of culture in LA is representative of the class war being experienced nationwide—corporate movie chains struggling while independent theaters flourish, taco trucks having lines as long as fine dining wait-lists, the homeless encampments underneath apartment complexes where a one-bedroom is $3800 a month, Oscar winners grabbing In-N-Out. The contrasts are on full display, everywhere, all of the time—here, you can’t ignore what America truly is, how the push and pull between the everyday people and the ones in control ebb and flow, the way you can in a suburb where the center of town consists of an Outback steakhouse and a Whole Foods.

That, and the weather is perfect like seven months out of the year.

Today’s haul from Stories

Man, Emily Wilson sure took Chris Nolan and The Odyssey to task in her review and I am all for it. If you’ve seen the film, the entire piece is worth reading—but the conclusion really brings her point home:

Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.

The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt.

For far too long, Chris Nolan has been relatively immune to criticism for reasons unknown. Perhaps it’s the striking imagery he’s been able to create—the black hole in Interstellar, the folding cities of Inception, the bomb in Oppenheimer—or maybe it’s that a couple performances have been Oscar-worthy (I would say Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight is the only truly great performance in a film of his, though). Whatever the reasoning, he’s considered critically by many journalists and social media cinephiles alike as one of the premier directors of this generation and I am absolutely dumbfounded as to why (I find Interstellar and Oppenheimer both to be as overrated as The Odyssey).

Good writing is the foundation of any cinematic achievement and none of Nolan’s films have had an above-average script. Worse still is his direction of conversational dialogue, which is often choppy on top of being drowned out by sound design that favors background environments and nonstop scores. His female characters are often hollow and disposable (and even the men are largely one-dimensional). He excels in aesthetic scale but consistently fails to deliver on any emotional, human level. It raises the questions: What are modern audiences looking for in a film, anyway? Why are these movies considered among the best of our time?

I can’t help but think this is less about Nolan being a bad director than it is more a sign of what art means to a society so molded by the vacuous, profit-driven ambitions of capitalism. Humanity must be stripped from most endeavors or people might feel guilty about the collateral damage that ensues from endlessly prioritizing financial well-being over that of the communities this economic model ‘serves.’ Under this ideological weight, art is chipped away at until it becomes nothing more than shallow entertainment—unchallenging to the audience or the interests behind the scenes that fund it. Consequently, we get these grand films of empty rhetoric which, more than anything else, become statements on the decline of our appreciation for the potential of culture in America.

In many ways, protest art doesn’t really make sense now. While one would think the rise of fascism would make for ample space for artists to respond, the truth is the parody Donald Trump and his cohort have made of media in general makes it difficult for any kind of traditional creativity to resonate. The ether of media has become a battleground where lines are drawn around political affiliation and people disregard or appropriate art for their own personal interpretations and could give a shit about the rest. Look no further than Elon Musk promising a ‘historically accurate’ AI version of The Odyssey.

Another recent case in point is Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead, which cited the ‘official’ death toll in Gaza—at which point people supportive of Israel would go around ‘correcting’ the album. (Other modern ironies are conservatives who listen to Rage Against The Machine to the point where Tom Morello had to explicitly tell them the music was not intended to support their perspective, or pro-police ilk adopting the Punisher skull without understanding its true history.)

I think Olivia Laing said it best in Funny Weather—

Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis? In 1967, George Steiner wrote a famous essay in which he observed that a concentration-camp commander could read Goethe and Rilke in the evening and still carry out his duties at Auschwitz in the morning, regarding this as evidence that art had failed in its highest function, to humanise. But this makes art sound like a magic bullet, which should reorganise our critical and moral faculties without effort, while simultaneously obliterating free will. Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read Dickens. It’s work. What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.

It is true that once a piece of art is finished, you can’t really control how it is interpreted by the audience—and while that has always been part of the beauty of creativity, in times when people use art in ways that are distinctly antithetical to its obvious intention in order to promote oppressive messages, it makes it increasingly difficult to portray an idea of dissent. Even as political affiliation has become entrenched in personal identity, people still don’t want to feel excluded from culture—however when your view of the world includes domination through violence, it’s tough to find art that supports that outlook.

Like everything else in the world currently in flux, it remains interesting to see how art responds to the progressively contentious political environment (and the world of art being increasingly intertwined with the capitalist systems that are obviously right-wing). Journalism has all but completely failed to hold the state accountable for its actions, and most art feels like it’s right there too. When all is said and done with this era, how art critics and historians write about what is happening now will surely be a good read.

The view from the new David Geffen Galleries

I’ve been spending some time at LACMA since the opening of the David Geffen Galleries earlier this summer. It’s nothing short of remarkable and easily has inserted itself into the conversation of not only the best art museum in Los Angeles, but possibly the entire west coast. (SFMOMA might still be on top and remains the only good thing about San Francisco—although the museum’s recent use of AI in a Google-sponsored exhibit certainly works against it.)

Conveniently enough, LA Metro debuted the D-Line expansion around the same time as the new galleries opened, making it even easier to get to mid-city. Returning home one night from the museum on the train, a guy in the group of friends next to me exclaimed, “I can’t believe we just got from La Brea to K-Town in two minutes. That’s insane.” (This is a trip that would take at least 15 minutes driving traffic-free.)

The new Metro station at Wilshire / Fairfax

These two expansions are probably the best thing to happen to LA since I moved here in 2020 and are desperate reminders how the places we live in the United States are sorely lacking for growth, be it in infrastructure, housing, or third spaces. The LACMA opening weekend brought in 60,000 visitors while the new Metro line lead to the highest ridership in six years.

It’s tough to watch countries like China undertake drastic urban development while the city council and mayor of Los Angeles worked to block new housing just last year. Politicians in the United States aren’t exactly known for getting things done, but it seems these days most are actively working against doing things for the people who elect them.

It’s just disheartening to see such positive response to a couple local changes to culture and public transit while so much of our city budget goes to the LAPD and our federal dollars to war and genocide and more cops. It isn’t difficult to imagine how much better life could be, but living in America, it just feels so out of reach.