I left Los Angeles disillusioned. I was not sorry to go; I was sorry to be relieved of the city that I’ve called my first real home in this country.
In Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve Babitz writes, “You can’t write a story about L.A. that doesn’t turn around in the middle or get lost.” Babitz, one of the godmothers of Los Angeles, is often relegated as just a hedonist. Hedonism is also often misunderstood as a death march—but as an artist, I’ve come to appreciate the practice as a necessity for mess. And art, as Babitz and Patti Smith and Georgia O'Keeffe would have told you, demands a breaking of natural order.
I think about Babitz often these days. Her chronicles of Los Angeles leaves little to the imagination, but never without love. Babitz saw Los Angeles as it was: a sprawling beast and in its stomach are inhabitants—such as herself—who were just as ravenous. The Los Angeles of my time still has an appetite, but in the sort of refined, Ozempic repressed, body bound in Skims way.
In Los Angeles, art has been rendered spineless. A performance devoid of anything personal or political. This is a sweeping generalization—of course there are exceptions, but less and less so—and it is less the fault of the individual than it is a condemnation of our culture. Studios are unwilling to take on original ideas, preferring the formulaic success of existing IPs (no matter how lazy), and resources are so scarce that Hollywood has effectively swallowed itself whole.
The business of entertainment has always been bleak. But in this economy where it’s all product—everything is content, not art—all of the time, we’ve lost sight of the process too.
Actors are less dedicated to craft and more preoccupied with digital branding. Writers try to appeal to a faceless ‘universal’ audience, neutering their work before it has a chance. Everyone can be an It Girl under the regime of the algorithm, so no one is. No one wants to make a mess anymore and it’s made for a beige and bland landscape.
Of course, the artists who do have something substantial to say are the ones swiftly punished. Former Scream star Melissa Barrera was publicly ousted from the franchise after shedding light on the genocide in Gaza. Author Viet Thanh Nguyen had his talk with 92NY cancelled after the Pulitzer Prize winner criticized Israel’s crimes. The racial dynamics are not lost on me and it goes without saying that the most marginalized artists are the first to be sent to the gallows.
I have nothing but admiration for these individuals and others who have risked their credibility and stability to stand for something real. True art, not in the banal and indulgent way as we’ve come to know it, is meant to be revealing, which is different from being polarizing for the sake of it.
Anything else is just performance.
All my life, I have been a poet. Somebody moving in the world by means of words. Somebody working to tell the truth, always. Somebody hoping to change, to transform, inertia and injustice, wherever I encounter these things, into equitable and loving circumstances for everyone to share. My means to these desired ends is the word, is poetry. — June Jordan
I was reading Just Kids by Patti Smith last week and what struck me the most is the couple’s lifelong dedication to their work and their spiritual devotion to it. Neither Smith nor Robert Mapplethorpe were concerned about being commercially beloved. Mapplethorpe’s work, in particular, was irreplaceable as he drew from his whole self. Though the pair did seek success, neither were willing to sacrifice the integrity of their art for it. They would be mavericks today, in a time when everything is a copy of a copy.
Last month, I deleted Final Draft at the suggestion of my playwriting professor. I hated the automated cleanliness of it; for $249.99, you can wrestle your creativity into something polished and lifeless. I now write in a blank document as the thoughts come to me, as messy and unfinished as they are. All lowercase, no formatting, but the beating heart of the story is there, which is what matters.
I don’t pretend to know what’s ahead. I’m in my own process of unforming my own creative practices, which I’m hoping to continue to do through my literary salon, and it has been as Babitz describes: a wretched ordeal, but a necessary one. In leaving Los Angeles—temporary as it is—I hope to find not just the soul of creativity, but the spine of it too.
When I look back at my body of work, I want to see it stand.