Elusive Hotspot Mastery

There isn't going to be a next time!-- Ryan O'Neal, against his romantic inclinations in an unhappy monastic focus.

There is something off kilter about Los Angles which, succinctly, is integral to its geography, integral to California’s veneer about its own progressive sensibilities. The dowager may no longer offer regressive members of ADAPT the tolerance she once doled on the teaspoon, but Jimmi Shrode was not in error when he warned me about the state’s cosmetic fraudulence, after a fashion. James Ellroy seems to pick it apart in his novels, gets at its essence through rather brutal citrus peels, terrible phantasms, grotesque, obsessive drives, like Harry Bosch going flintly in the face of a threat. Welliver’s character is an unabashed liberal, playing off a hip sidekick of a partner and a lesbian lieutenant who has parity with the title character when it comes to testosterone and an honorable pair of testicles, but he is also a frightening vigilante, and this behavior stems not from liberalism, but from cowboy culture, easily superimposed on Walter Hill’s exposition of the sprawling metropolis as a location. Just as Ellroy’s literary LA has a very dark undercurrent, one that is not comparable to Austin but might run parallel to tortured white male psyches. Walter Hill’s LA is a function of the underground. Though The Driver has scenes shot in sunlight and even pastel-light backgrounds, it is a movie about what happens after dark, beneath the surface, by those who have no desire for Bruce Dern’s zealous attention. Ostensible reality cop shows too though, illustrate LA’s bizarre bicameral indigestion with cultural appropriation. Only in LA does a patrol officer allow bygones to be bygones, counseling a crippled white gimp about a twenty dollar fuck with a toothless black ho whose gaunt frame was claimed by narcotics long ago, sad, but just as much Hollywood kitsch as real, and rather fragile, glamor. Entertainment’s intersection with the street is only a part of the whole, a synecdoche distinct from other cities with stark impersonal landscapes, like Tokyo, part sprawl, part superhighway, part architecture which looks like pastry boxes. Somehow, we don’t all get along, in this desert of 4 million, iuterlaced with a nearly predominant Mexican culture and so much sometimes tragic, sometimes braced, tension, by disaster or design.

He died of a heart attack in a swimming pool; so much for igniting headlines like an earthquake, coast to coast.