Los Angeles: Saturday March 25th


We’re in San Francisco all of 14 hours. The weather rolled in during the afternoon and the spring morning gave way to a late fall afternoon. And even while the backstage route to the buses was almost unbearably damp I still didn’t mind too much. (Even the stage got rained-on in San Francisco, I mean inside the venue…there’s a story there for someone else to tell, I am sure. We killed the power to the upstage lighting to keep the band alive. You’d never have known if you were in the audience). I console myself with the knowledge that later that night we’re driving to Los Angeles: it never rains in Southern California.

While both the city and the people of San Francisco feel real and dignified in comparison to its Southern counterpart, I’m almost ashamed to admit that I’m excited by the slutty appeal of Los Angeles. Almost ashamed. Los Angeles is the girl you shouldn’t want, but do; the girl who never calls you back until she’s bored, and yet you rush to go meet her when she does. Which is a long way around of saying that LA fucks with your head. Like all the ex-girlfriends you can’t shake do.

Another night on the bus, another night of rattling around listening to Neko, Fiona and Emiliana and sleeping in fits and starts in my clothes. Strangely, waking up at a truck-stop only five miles from Magic Mountain, I feel rested. It’s a fitting locale. The evening’s show will be near Disneyland. I browse the trucker hats, compilation CDs and mud-flap decals while the bus is refueled and feel shamefully expectant, like the protagonist in Jacques Brel’s Mathilde.

As we near the north of The Valley our driver points out which overpasses were destroyed in a quake and which towns were used as locations for the original Dukes of Hazzard series. Something about the commentary reminds me of being on the Universal City tour. If he were to add that the bus couldn’t slow to below forty-five miles and hour and Keanu is underneath trying to dislodge a bomb I don’t think I’d be surprised. I’d probably go to see where Sandra Bullock was hanging out in the back lounge, truth be told… Instead I watch the strip malls increase in frequency alongside the freeway, I see the suburbs sprawl up the hillsides like sink stains and I wonder for the first of a dozen times: what on earth do all these people do here?


From my hotel room I can see the Hollywood sign on the hill behind Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The street in front of the Chinese Theatre is busy with tourists and character look-alikes posing for pictures in tired costumes with worn cuffs. On the other side of the hotel I can see a large parking-lot trawled by the hopheads, the homeless, hookers and their johns. I take it in turns to watch both. It’s ten-thirty a.m.

Downstairs in the lobby it feels like the whole hotel is trying to out-cool itself, from the guests to the guys valeting cars. The effort is understated but unmistakable. In LA everyone checks everyone else out all the time. Anyone could be a someone. Women glance at you twice, so do the men. For a moment it’s easy to mistake this as flirting, and I’m sure, if you are a someone, it is. For the modern day Sodom that LA is supposed to be, it’s a tepid broil of middle-class anxiety. No one truly exists in their own world – only in a perceived context with everyone else. You are either more or less hip than others, with two responses available to you: aloofness and/or shameless huckstering.

To really set yourself apart in LA I think you need to ignore everyone else. It’s the one thing that everyone at our hotel couldn’t bring themselves to do.