Cintra on L.A. (One)

You may recall my mention that I’m really enjoying my couple-of-pages-a-day reading of Cintra Wilson‘s book. Well, here’s a quote about Los Angeles that stood out for me while reading the book, presented for your amusement:

The “Ha-ha, Satan lives in L.A.” jokes are not really funny anymore, because they’re too eerily true. There’s so many hoof tracks and triple-6 brands on the teats of the locals that the presence of Real Evil is as banal and commonplace as that of a Big Mac. L.A. is the place where Satan squats with an enormous ladle and dips deeply into his black cavity to extract huge soiled wads of cash, which he then pitches at the heads of the inhabitants below with such speed and force that they are rendered first unconscious, then punchy and depressed. This affliction causes them to overfeed the Dark Lord a-more with their incessant compromises in the workplace, and He devours and digests their creepy and self-negating decisions by day, and befouls them anew with the sooty issue of their moral failures each evening. Los Angeles brings to mind all of the jokes everyone tells about lawyers. If major cities had human personalities, L.A. would be either an entertainment management executive or a defense attorney, in a red plastic economy Mercedes, driving twenty miles an hour on the 10 Santa Monica, getting a hand job from a seventeen-year-old prostitute while lying to his wife on the cell phone. The rhythm of the streets of L.A. is the soundtrack of Faust performed by Yanni and John Tesh, and it sells zillions and zillions of copies.

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If Hollywood has been intrinsically corrupt since its inception, it is exponentially more so now. L.A. today is a sad and damaging fiasco, a far cry from the champagne star giddiness of the thirties, when a beautiful girl could hit the Big Time by walking into a soda fountain with no socks. Now there is no counting the miles of hotel sheets a would-be starlet will have to swim through to get a reading for a walk-on part in a sitcom, or the horrible court battles a wannabe jukebox hero will have to endure before he can wrench his own music out of the gnarled grip of insidious bloodsucking industry trolls, or the endless hail of mirrors anybody who wants to work in film will have to break her nose against before she can be a personal boot-wiper for “important people.” Everyone in L.A. walks around with the noxious smog impregnated down into the entrails of his/her being. Everyone KNOWS it’s corrupt, all of it. It’s the Mexican prison of art: Everything is controlled by money and the twisted whims of a few fat guys holding the keys. But it’s the only game in town, and if you’re not playing, God help you, you may as well try to get a job with the illegal aliens down at El Pollo Loco