Late night television: at certain points – somewhere among the fragments of Robot Chicken, The L Word, and a long advertisement for a CD set of 'Classic Soul' – there are so many echoing fragments of Los Angeles: Industry in-jokes, with night views behind a talking head through a plate glass window, clearly in a house in the hills – Topanga, Laurel, other canyons; shots of the 405 above UCLA, in sight of the Getty; all the cloud of knowing references, tropes, common views and images. Because certain shows tend to emphasize their Hollywood sources – especially casually produced ones – the television screen makes watchers into inhabitants of a Greater LA.
Which gives me strange, disoriented sense of never having left LA... and, with the realization that I'm not really there, am in fact on another continent and a number of degrees of latitude to the north, there is a sense of being out of it: of being away from the center of things, in the provinces, in the boonies, uncool. Much as, in different eras and under different influences, someone would have felt far from Paris, or far from London, or far from New York.
But of course LA has better weather than any of those....
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