Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles

Wasteland Weekend: thousands of postapocalyptic types arriving dressed up like they were auditioning for Mad Max, to enjoy a Burning Man–style circus of gladiator fights.

About sixty years later, California City was the third-largest city in California, going by area, but the town was a mere outpost: about fourteen thousand residents, not including the desert tortoises or a few thousand prison inmates.

Gold died from pancreatic cancer in 2018 at the age of fifty-seven. The day after, I drove around Los Angeles to eat three of his favorite Mexican dishes: smoked marlin tacos in Inglewood, a shrimp taco in Boyle Heights, the clayuda at an Oaxacan restaurant in Koreatown.

“I absolutely think of Los Angeles as a city-state,” Mayor Eric Garcetti told me. “The root of politics is the same as the root word in Greek for city, polis. People engage in politics because they came to a city and vice versa. There’s no question that we are a city state, even though we chop ourselves up in a confusing way.”

7.16 What can be said of the United States often can be said most clearly about Los Angeles. Historically, the city-state had often suggested where not only the American city was headed but also the American people, with all their Americanness. All gig workers now, all climate refugees now. All of us trapped, consciously or not, by our racist past

A place of layers. A place of palimpsest. A place of loss.

Los Angeles: was an exercise in horror vacui. Los Angeles: was algae from the future. Los Angeles: ate at the dream side of my mind.

Sometimes, when I really hated Los Angeles, I thought the actress was right. All the suffering and concrete added up to zero or less, as Bret Easton Ellis would have it—a sun-blasted nothing, a brainless amoeba with vital forces seeping in and out of the body public in some dysfunctional communion.

Wernher von Braun, the former SS officer who became the public face of modern American rocketry, was asked if NASA would ever employ women astronauts. Indeed, he said, on a future mission “we’re reserving 110 pounds of payload for recreational equipment.”