DANA GIOIA
Los Angeles
as a Cultural Home
I have spent exactly two thirds of my life in California and the rest of it elsewhere—in New York, Washington, Boston, Rome, and Vienna. I was born and raised in California, specifically in southwest Los Angeles in the town of Hawthorne. For many years I have divided my time between rural northern California and Los Angeles where I teach each fall semester at the University of Southern California.
Despite the problems and expense of living in the Golden State, I can’t imagine any circumstances that would make me leave. Even when I lived elsewhere, I constantly visited L.A. So in one way or another I have been around since Christmas Eve, 1950 when I arrived four weeks early to ruin my parent’s holiday plans. I speak, therefore, as a native son and cultural product of a city whose only cultural advantage, according to Woody Allen, “is being able to make a right turn on a red light.”
Such abuse bothers me not at all. I am used to it. Wherever I’ve gone over the years, I’ve always identified myself as a Californian and an Angeleno, which I assure you is an excellent conversation opener in artistic and intellectual circles. Everyone has an opinion about L.A., especially in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts. If you ask people about Moscow or Beijing, London or Toronto, you will probably get a brief and perfunctory response. But everybody’s opinion of L.A. is detailed and emphatic. Significantly, one encounters such responses even in foreign countries, because the world has been saturated with images of L.A. from TV and movies. The City of the Angels has been—for almost a century now—a cultural symbol.
If I were to summarize the thousands of opinions I’ve heard over the years, I could say they fall mostly into five predictable categories. (The quotations are my own paraphrases unless otherwise noted.)
1. Los Angeles isn’t really a city, just sprawling suburbs connected by freeways. You know the clichés. “It has no downtown.” “It has no character.” “There’s no ‘there there.’” “The town is inconceivably shoddy,” harrumphed H. L. Mencken, “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.”
2. Los Angeles is a city of transients. “No one was born here.” “People come to L.A. to pursue their dreams.” “No one feels a sense of belonging.” “Everything is new, and nothing is built to last.” “There is no local character except delusional expectations of sunshine, wealth, and stardom.” In the words of a Bertolt Brecht poem that his fellow German exile Hanns Eisler set to music, “Paradise and hell can be the same city.”
3. Los Angeles is shallow and inauthentic. “All surface, no depth.” “Surfers and starlets gliding over the surface of life.” “Like a Hollywood set, a bright facade, with nothing behind the surface.” “The two symbols of L.A. are Disneyland and Hollywood.” As the radio comedian Fred Allen said about Southern California, “It’s a great place to live—if you’re an orange.”
4. Los Angeles is the center of bland, suburban, consumerist culture. “The worst of materialism combined with credulous faddism.” “It lacks the depth of older cities and deeper culture or tradition.” “What passes for culture is driven by food and novelty—yoga, transcendental meditation, vegetarianism.” As a forgotten journalist of the 1930s described the City of Angels—“that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities.”
5. Los Angeles has no artistic culture except showbiz, no intellectual life. “No art, only entertainment as a commodity.” “Commercial Hollywood has devoured all the other arts.” “It is the land of make-believe.” “Everything is surface and show.” As F. Scott Fitzgerald said about Hollywood, “It’s a mining town in lotus land.”
I will address these points later, but first let me share a bit of my background because understanding any place depends on your perspective. Are you looking at it from the inside or the outside? Do you perceive it as home or a stopover?
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Dana Gioia is a poet and critic. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which received the American Book Award, and 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016), which won the Poets’ Prize. His critical collections include Can Poetry Matter? (1992) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. He has written four opera libretti and edited twenty literary anthologies. Gioia is the former Poet Laureate of California. He also served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 to 2009. Gioia is the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California.
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