Home Is Where Your Agent Is

L.A. dwellers, try this. Travel to any place on this planet, spend at least a week there. Speak to the people, eat the food, breathe in and out. Then return to Hollywood. What is the first thing that hits you? The cars, yes that’s one thing. Their size, flash and cost crying out not for just attention, but adulation. What else? Ah, the people. Artificial lashes, noses, chests, and hair extensions begging for love not so much for the person underneath but for an idealized version of that person’s youth.

Does anything else hit you? Maybe how no one connects with you when you talk to them – how they’re too busy looking around for that phantom producer, lover, or spiritual savior. What else? Oh, the ubiquitous get healthy now or die culture; free range, free radical, natural and organic everything, and at the same time a culture as un-naturally and inorganically devoid of a human context as humanly possible.

My point? In spite of all this, we continue to live here as we try to create meaningful lives for ourselves and those we love. The promise of eternal youth, global admiration if successful, and a feeling that we are no longer anonymous (but highly visible) – these add up to a formula that deceives us in our youth, enrages us in middle age, and leaves us feeling lobotomized when old. But it must be what we want. Everyone who leaves Hollywood eventually comes back, and usually for less money.