We started out our first day in Los Angeles with a tour of CBS Studios in Studio City, CA, where they film shows like Entertainment Tonight and CSI: New York, while in the past other shows like Seinfeld and Gilligan’s Island. Entertainment Tonight’s Canaan Rubin showed us around many of the sets, studios, productions rooms, editing bays, and all the people that come together to make a show go on air.
This experience helped us get insight into the human hands that go into the finished products we see and experience throughout every day of our lives. Before our eyes, we were meeting the people and watching them edit a cultural artifact that would be sent out very shortly thereafter to many corners of the world. I will pick back up on this discussion further down on this blog, as I need to get into the rest of our time in Los Angeles.
From Studio City, we hopped on the 101, took the Malibu Canyon Road exit, and within half an hour, we had reached coast number two on this trip. Weaving around the mountains on the two-lane road, we came around one corner to just barely make out the deep blue in the distance. We barreled through a tunnel and a few seconds later, we were staring at the Pacific Ocean. It was a sight of much relief for all of us. By Day 11, we had reached the West Coast. We stopped of for a few minutes to rest, talk, and meditate (for me, with the accompaniment of Sigur Ros’s “Með Blóðnasir”, a two-minute song that has walked with me through many experiences over the past few years).
We took the Pacific Coast Highway down through Malibu and into Santa Monica, where we stopped to get some lunch and relax for the afternoon on the beach near the Santa Monica pier. After a few hours of some much-needed down time, we took off around 6 for Huntington Beach’s “Surf City Nights,” a weekly festival in one of the main hubs of Orange County . As we drove through Redondo Beach and then into Long Beach, further from LAX and closer to Orange County, we saw the scenes change much, while still staying on the Pacific Coast Highway. From the plush $10 million dollar homes in Malibu, with a few local restaurants and the beach highly visible, we cut inland to find Fast Cash and liquor stores on many corners. As we kept driving, we stumbled upon the underbelly of Los Angeles County, which probably explains the stratified neighborhood surrounding it: the shipping docks…acres and acres of nothing but huge crates, cranes, and barges. This is the image of Los Angeles we never seem to see, yet it is, I’m sure, incredibly important to its economy.
The sun was lying down over the ocean as we were parking in Huntington Beach and we were able to absorb its last rays with the accompanying wind along the soft sand of the beach. We grabbed some fish tacos (tofu for me) from Wahoo’s and walked around for a bit, only to walk upon a pretty interesting group of guys breakdancing on the street, sharing with us themes of cultural understanding, love, and staying away from drugs. The interesting thing was that the group continued to play up racial and ethnic stereotypes in efforts to get money from the crowd, to which nearly everyone was turned off. Not the best strategy to get money by loudly proclaiming “ten dollars from the Asian lady everyone!” Our incredibly tired group ventured on back up to Venice Beach to crash in the bus for a few hours of sleep.
We were up early on Day 2 in our dire need of showers, to which one of the UCLA rec. centers came to the rescue. (We hadn’t showered since Salt Lake – going on day 4 by that point.) We drove up and through Beverly Hills to see the smog-covered city beneath, next to many multi-million dollar homes yet again… After a little time here, we decided to head to Anaheim for Disneyland.
Now, this is where I will pick back up with what I left off earlier when talking about all the human thoughts, hands, and words that go into cultural artifacts that we use – rather, consume – on a daily basis. In the week before we left on the trip, we were asked to read the social theorist Jean Baudrillard’s article on Disneyland and hyperreality. In my perspective, Baudrillard is saying that in Disneyland, we all know that the settings are fake and the plots for all the attractions are simply there to entertain us. We see Goofy and know there is a person inside the suit. When in the queue line for the Haunted Mansion, we realize that all the gravestones, the cobwebs, the wallpaper, and the employees’ uniforms are put there to get us into a mood, to entertain us, if you will. Disneyland presents to us a simulation of the real, the actual, what truly (or imaginatively) exists in reality: The jungle vines, the quest for treasure, and the slue of eastern statues leading up to the Indian Jones ride speak to our Orientalist ideas of the East, laden with danger, adventure, and mysticism. At Space Mountain, we have everything – the chairs, the archways, the trash cans – ending in futuristic, pointed angles… containing purple and silver (and outdated) designs of galaxies everywhere.
What Baudrillard is saying is that we live in a permanent Disneyland, with a gift shop at every corner. Nearly everything we encounter on a daily basis has been laid out by human hands and minds: the houses we live in, the cars we drive, the roads we drive on, the toothbrushes we use, the television we watch. The Disneyland themes of “happily ever after” and “the place where dreams come true” are more covertly laden in advertising media. All of it was designed by some one to sell us something – an item, an idea, a path. When we fail to see all that we encounter as products of engineers, of urban planners, of scriptwriters, we begin to believe that this is reality. As a good friend of mine often does, let us imagine the landscape as just that – the landscape, free of buildings and all our creations – simply as nature. Los Angeles as a desert coast. Aspen as a mountain. Chicago as a lakeside. Disneyland as a simulation of reality then becomes reality itself, because we know this theme park was created for our entertainment, our pleasure, our dollar. What we call reality on a daily basis is a simulation without a map of the original – in essence, the hyperreal. There is no reference point by which we define this human-created reality. This hyperreal we will buy, barter, and consume throughout our lives. This was worded beautifully by an interior designer from Irvine, CA, who I was able to chat with in the line for Space Mountain. “Orange County is a Disneyland. You have your women running around – breast implants, tiny waists, Range Rovers, incredibly tan, holding 9 dollar coffees. It is a system that defines itself as to what is desirable, and none of it is real. Yet it is so easy to get trapped in that system.”
So, how does this lead us into what it is to be an American? What actually unites us on a daily basis? The answer might be simply – consumption.