LA would be perfect for someone like you

It’s December 1979. There are sandinistas in Nicaragua, rebels in Cambodia, ayatollahs in Iran, Soviets in Afghanistan. Pink Floyd just released The Wall. My parents, who haven’t met yet, are freshly refugees. And somewhere inside the sprawling federation of microstates known as Los Angeles — a place I’ll come to live 42 years hence — the latest issue of Playboy hits shelves with an article bearing the same name. See, look: here’s a copy that doesn’t look too sticky.

Playboy? Isn’t that a little gross (and entirely passé)? Not at all. It’s 1979, baby: don’t you know they used to publish surprisingly highbrow writing? We’re just, uh, reading it for the articles. This one takes some digging to find, though. It’s buried in the back half of a hefty 300+ page issue, interspersed with cigar and whiskey advertisements, barely published at all. Wait — here it is: Los Angeles.

What is Los Angeles? Los Angeles is approximately ten pages long. Los Angeles is a psychosexual census of Los Angeles and its inhabitants, written by Barry Farrell and Penelope McMillan (two people about whom I can find only unsatisfyingly little detail online), their contribution to a short-running city-by-city series called “Sex in America.” Los Angeles is all about little confessional interviews with singles, swingers, gays, and prostitutes. Los Angeles seems to imply they’re real, but who knows? This is late New Journalism: literary, humanistic, and “more concerned with truth than with facts.” Los Angeles is saying something about how people navigate the carnal geography of Los Angeles, its fashions and expectations, its economy of glances. Yes, it’s definitely saying something. I just need to figure out what.

Now that we approximately know what Los Angeles is, it would probably be helpful to know what Los Angeles is. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a much more difficult problem. Los Angeles has at times been referred to as a city in California, or the second-most populous city in the United States, or some combination of metropolitan statistical areas and county polities that span over 1,000 km² of land. Los Angeles may be Sunset Boulevard or Mulholland Drive or “a large concrete plain between the hills of Pasadena and the Pacific ocean.”¹ Los Angeles is ruled by five little queens, which seems important to note. Los Angeles is a synecdoche of itself, a capriccio of itself, and is now playing in theaters. Los Angeles is a “sprawling federation of microstates,” which I came up with at the start of this post, and which I think sounds pretty good.

Look, all I’m saying is that I’ve been living here for almost 5 years now, and I’m still really very confused. (It’s 2026 again now.) This is a weird place to live, a weird place to date, and a weird place to do a PhD. It’s very LA, you know. It’s glorious and disgusting. It’s very fleshy. But I’ve been operating under the unexamined assumption that these are all very modern problems, demanding modern etiologies. In that regard, reading Los Angeles feels like a revelation. Oh! It’s sorta always been this way. “There is at the surface infinite variety of things; at the centre there is simplicity of cause.” Same as it ever was.

For that reason, Los Angeles must be infinitely more interesting today than it could possibly have been back in 1979. So much that must have seemed incidental and contemporary reveals itself to be more fundamental, not downstream of social media or dating apps or digital porn or whatever. Is there something in the water? Does LA arise from a set of axioms? Does LA have a heart? (Farrell and McMillan think not.) It’s just so captivating and oddly timeless, and yet no one has ever heard of it. So — hand-transcribed by yours truly out of a real vintage paper copy,² here is Los Angeles, supposedly now 47 years out-of-date. If you share the uncertain pleasure of living here, let me know what you think.

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