longing and loathing

Today D & I get to visit two greyhounds! One off-hand remark from the adoption coordinator has made us set our hearts on one of the dogs, to the point that we’re already talking in terms of, “oh, when X is here, we’ll all walk together to get frozen yogurt!” and “no, X wouldn’t want his dog bed there.” We’ve even made up nicknames for the dog. One is The Doge.

Anyway, trying to unbias my thoughts before the two visits. Equal opportunity dog employer. Have a notebook with some interview questions. (“What is your idea of perfect happiness?” “Which historical figure do you most identify with?”)

I’m especially excited to see the suburbs in which the foster families reside, first La Mirada, then Torrance. Spending 3.5 years in an LA suburb (and reading a fair amount of Pynchon) has made me fond of them, or at least highly interested. I recently read (and recommend to you, dear reader) DJ Waldie’s Holy Land, about the tract homes of the South Bay suburbs. Yes, he can be a but dramatic, but I still love what Waldie’s doing — more people should be writing about LA. Everybody should be writing about LA.

Waldie also delineates the main function of LA-writing as we know it thus far: to hate on the city. Even a century ago the writing on LA was “caustic” — a city to suspect, not one to embrace. I like that Wim Wenders says that “Los Angeles is about stories and fiction and dreams” (sounding like Herzog there!), but like even better what Richard Schickel says: “Face it. Los Angeles is an incredibly unstable place.”

And it’s this — LA’s unreality, instability, and the way it squirms from definition — that I like about the place. As Waldie says, LA is not the only city that promised immigrants “the chance to be radically inauthentic (softened to a positive sounding ‘re-invention’)” (so good!). And yet it’s the city most often maligned for once being “an imperfect paradise and is now a perfect hell.”

It all just makes for a very interesting place. And a big place! I think we’ll be logging more than two hours in the car today, from Hollywood to Whittier to the South Bay and back again. I’ll of course report back on The Doge interview process. Stay tuned.

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