yesterday i flew from berlin to london to l.a.
the best part of the trip was flying over greenland. greenland, from the air, looks like afghanistan, but with a lot more snow. and probably a less thriving opium trade, i’m guessing.
now i’m in l.a, staying at a hotel from the 20’s that has hosted everyone from frank sinatra to marilyn monroe and iggy pop.
i love l.a. i know not everyone loves l.a, but for some reason i really love l.a. i love that although it has some pretty and affluent parts it’s for the most part always kind of sleazy, at least in hollywood. well, almost everywhere, actually. even pretty and gentrified venice and los feliz and silverlake are still fairly sleazy once you look close enough.
new york, on the other hand, has lost a lot of it’s sleaze. sleaze has been priced out of manhattan, for better or worse (i tend to come down on the ‘worse’ side). i mean, there will always be vice and degeneracy in nyc. but vice and degeneracy are different from sleaze. vice and degeneracy tend to be lucrative and/or costly, whereas sleaze just tends to stumble along in its own relative squallor. vice is a ceo smoking crack with a hooker in $3,000 a night hotel suite. degeneracy is executives having drug fueled sex in a bathroom after spending $500 on cocktails. sleaze is a 48 year old drag queen eating runny eggs in a diner on sunset. new york has plenty of vice and degeneracy, but a decided lack of indigenous, home-grown sleaze in 2009. then again, ‘lack of sleaze’ is a relative term. new york is still one of the sleazier places on the planet, especially when compared to just about every other city in the western world.
i’m sure if proust lived in the lower east side he’d have something remarkably trenchant to say about the drag queens slowly leaving for browner pastures. maybe they’ve moved to l.a and san francisco. that would make sense. except i don’t know if they’d be able to drive very well in 6″ heels.
moby