I grew up in LA, in the white brick barracks of Park la Brea just south of the Farmers Market with my mom, and in a half dozen apartments around Westwood Village with my dad, and I loved it. It was all I knew, sure, but it was all there was. It was plenty. To my miniature POV LA seemed as big and epic and dangerous and majestic as the entirety of middle earth — beyond which, for all I knew, there might very well have been dragons. But who cared. Everything a lil un could dream of was there in the shadows on the Hollywood hills. It was Locksley and La Mancha and The Shire in one. With a beach! Sort of. And the provincial feeling that it was the capital of the world.
Now, eh. Now, I dunno. Now… I don’t really like what they’ve done with the place. I’m joking, mostly. It is enormously different than when I was growing up of course. Everything prefab glass and aluminum (instead of cottage cheese stucco), as if it all came from the same architecture catalog as a Chipotles. Which is whatever — there are entire schools dedicated to the monstrosity and splendor and monstrosity again of LA architecture. And on development. And city planning.
The LA that I miss, though, the LA that I long for and which no longer exists was a sprawling emptiness. Cracked and fissured asphalt parking lots and playgrounds gone to seed, gone much more than to seed, gone to full apocalyptic growth of weeds and grasses. It was miles of canvas for can artists and skateboarders. Whole worlds of dilapidated sunshiney streets in which an only child could have the silly idea that it was anything like Locksley or The Shire, because it could be anything, everything. It was a broken black top no man’s land for as far as the eye could see. At least that’s how I remember it.
And now of course it is all filled in, all built up, all jam packed. Which could be said of anywhere, everywhere. And because of both the endless explosions of population and its flow to cities, it happens to be true of everywhere and will continue to be so until it all collapses. Which makes it a ridiculous thing to say, let alone to lament. Except that my bringing it up, my dreamy recollection of it is less a lament exactly than it is an articulation of nostalgia, and maybe that might mean something? I don’t know. I know that nostalgia is capital-E Evil in the public imagination. Not a single Paris Review interview goes by without the great and good excoriating nostalgia as pure poison, the bane of humanity. But despite all of that… I don’t know. I kinda love the sticky sweet sentimentality of a hazy focus memory, the retro-mantic dreaminess of a, hey, remember when... And I have to think that that engine that drives the campy costuming of a 70s period piece, of interest in Indie Sleaze, a recent re-appreciation of Colombo-style aesthetics, or 1990s Spago merch is sorta similar to what I’m on about here. And it can’t be all bad.
At least, there are some LA-nostalgia Instagram accounts that seem to be pretty popular, and make me feel a little less alone in this — even if they are sort of unintentionally trolling me with pictures of the Cadillac in the roof of the Hard Rock Cafe at the Beverly Center, say, a landmark I drove by at least twice a day and spent more waking hours around than I could ever count during my childhood.
I think what I found so affecting about the last quarter, say, of Babylon was the way in which it played with nostalgia to show us ourselves in miniature. Of course it made me sad, sort of unbearably sad, the last little bit in praise of movies, because it shows us how small we are even against the relatively recent, and quick timeline of film history, what a blip we are in the proceedings. Movies, in Babylon, are a kind of library then of our aspirations and values, our hopes and dreams and fears, and so a great reference as well as an escape for us to go back to. But as the whole movie shows, movies, like our collective and personal memories, make great fodder for still further memories and even for more movies. They can themselves be source material for fantasies that describe the hopes and fears of our times today.
In fact, I wonder if we shouldn’t actually be thinking of nostalgia more broadly as a part of the creative impulse, taking a tear sheet from memory (whether lived or inferred from the collective storytelling) to make a moodboard for our eventual world building. Nostalgia is so specific, so radically personal, a mini movie of aesthetic impressions that we have made for ourselves over time — and which might bear no similarity whatever to a neighbor’s a contemporary’s a schoolmate’s. In a way nostalgia is our involuntary aesthetic expression. The way we remember and or savor things probably says more about our tastes and interests than we give it credit for. And of course that process is the foundation on which we all build the basis of our present and ongoing tastes and beliefs and even identities. There are a number of commercial artists and photographers and even filmmakers whose signature style is itself a kind of fetishization and recreation of a time gone by. And why not. If that is there happy place, and touches on ours, a little dreamy escape can probably do us all some good (I’ve been avoiding saying this but obvs I want to make a distinction from the kind of revanchist nonsense, the once we were warriors fantasy of fascists everywhere from our media and congress to the leading party in Hungary and and on and on — that is not nostalgia; that is something else).
And I think part pf the reason I find LA so difficult to visit these days is that, when I am there, the real city cannot help but overwrite my memory of the place which I seem to be holding on to for some reason, some solace. And maybe I ought to go and just obliterate it once and for all and do a sort of half memoir half new story on LA. I dunno. Maybe some day. Anyway, what city are you nostalgic for? What place, what time?
Growing up in the east, I longed for the open oasis that California, specifically LA, held. The sunny, hazy cinematography of Shampoo, for example, was like a beckoning Eden I longed to experience. When I finally got to Los Angeles decades later, there it was, albeit overgrown, but still visibly the mecca I'd dreamt of seeing. For the rest of us who aren't Angelenos that city as we imagined it still exists.
I live in L.A. and I am still nostalgic for it. Even though I am here, it's a parallel universe to what I remember. The only thing that doesn't change is the silhouette of the little Hollywood Hills, and the wide expanse of blue sky when you can get away from the scrapers. Thanks for your ruminations on remembrance. But do come visit. Some of the old magic is still to be found, if sought...